Spring 2024 Drexel CCI Research Round-up

This spring, Drexel University's College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) hosted a range of workshops and conferences, covering topics from information processing to AI-ready data. Meanwhile, faculty and graduate students made notable contributions to prestigious conferences worldwide, showcasing their expertise that spanned the computing and information science disciplines.

Hosted Workshops and Conferences:

• The College of Computing & Informatics’ Department of Computer Science hosted the twenty-third meeting of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) TC-2 working group on Program Generation (WG 2.11) from March 25 to 28 at 3675 Market Street. Organized by Geoffrey Mainland, PhD, associate professor, a member since 2020, the meeting brought together researchers from North America, Europe, and Japan as well as members of the local academic community at Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania. Over the course of three and a half days, attendees discussed current work related to the automatic generation of computer programs. Established in 1962, IFIP TC2 explores software theory and practice with the aim of improving software quality by studying all aspects of the software development process to better understand and enhance programming concepts.

• On March 27, CCI’s Metadata Research Center (MRC) co-hosted a workshop at the University of California - San Diego as part of DATALIS™ — a collaboration between UC San Diego, Drexel University, OCLC, and the University of New Mexico. The workshop aimed to build on the work of LEADING, an Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) professional education program hosted by MRC that focuses on developing data science expertise in students and early career information science professionals. As key lead of the LEADING program, Drexel's MRC serves as the central-coordinating hub and will oversee the data science curriculum and bring together all project partners. This year's LEADING program hosted 81 fellows.

• On April 12 to 14, CCI hosted the 10th International Workshop on Plan 9. This conference serves as the primary event focused on Plan 9, the operating system developed at Bell Labs as a successor to UNIX. More than 25 researchers and developers from North America and Europe attended in person, including several Drexel students, as well as several hundred streams via Plan 9 Foundation’s YouTube channel. This year's workshop was the second held by the Plan 9 Foundation. Brian Stuart, PhD, teaching professor of computer science, served as local coordinator and chair of the program committee.

• CCI’s Metadata Research Center (MRC) hosted a “The AI-Ready Data: Navigating the Dynamic Frontier of Metadata and Ontologies” workshop as part of its membership within the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Institute for Data Driven Dynamical Design (ID4). Held on April 15 and 16 at 3675 Market Street, the workshop brought together a community of experts across the data lifecycle to discuss issues, share solutions, and chart a path forward for addressing key challenges in preparing artificial intelligence-ready data for scientific research. The workshop was led by Jane Greenberg, PhD, Alice B. Kroeger Professor, ID4 investigator and MRC director. Researchers from Drexel University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Princeton University, Florida International University and other prestigious institutions presented their research during a poster session on April 15 in CCI’s space at 3675 Market Street.

Presentations, Publications & Keynotes:

• Michael Ekstrand, PhD, assistant professor, was keynote speaker at the Information Retrieval for Under studied Users (IR4U2) workshop during the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). ECIR is the annual premier European forum (March 24 to 28 in Glasgow, Scotland) for the presentation of new research results in the broadly conceived area of information retrieval. Ekstrand’s talk, titled “To Serve Whom and How? Provocations on the Political and Ethical Foundations of Access to Information Access,” explored the ethical and societal motivations behind the push for broader access to information access technologies. View the complete keynote on Ekstrand’s website.

• Preetha Chatterjee, PhD, assistant professor, co-authored three papers to be published in the proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), the premier software engineering conference (April 12 to 21 in Lisbon, Portugal): “Uncovering the Causes of Emotions in Software Developer Communication Using Zero-shot Large Language Models (LLMs)”; “Shedding Light on Software Engineering-specific Metaphors and Idioms”; and “Exploring ChatGPT for Toxicity Detection in GitHub” (with Shyamal Mishra, MS computer science ’24). She also co-authored a paper with PhD computer science candidate Ramtin Ehsani, titled “Incivility in Open Source Projects: A Comprehensive Annotated Dataset of Locked GitHub Issue Threads,” to be published in the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), data showcase track (April 14 and 15 in Lisbon, Portugal). Chatterjee also chaired the program committee for MSR’s mining challenge track.

• Edward Kim, PhD, associate professor, with PhD in computer science candidates Maryam Daniali and Jocelyn Rego, co-authored a paper titled “The selectivity and competition of the mind’s eye in visual perception,” published in the proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (April 14 to 19 in Seoul, Korea). ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications.

• Multiple CCI graduate students participated in the eighth annual Drexel Emerging Graduate Scholars (DEGS) Conference, a University-wide conference highlighting Drexel's graduate student research, held this year at the Bossone Research Enterprise Center on April 24 and 25. Adesewa Adesida, MS information systems ’25, BS computer science ‘23, presented their research titled “Basta Clinic Management Database System,” during the Conference’s oral research presentation session (watch Adesida’s presentation on YouTube). Two doctoral students presented their research posters: Marissa Gonzalez, PhD information science ‘28, on “Attracting and Recruiting Ethical Software Developers: An Emerging Graduate Scholar’s Preliminary Review”; and Joel Pepper, PhD in Computer Science ‘24, on “An Epithelium-Inspired Deformation Modeling Framework for 4D Sheets.” CCI Associate Professor Michelle L. Rogers, PhD served as a judge.

• John S. Seberger, PhD, assistant professor, Afsaneh Razi, PhD, assistant professor, and Nora McDonald, PhD information science '19, assistant professor, George Mason University, published a paper at the 2024 ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (May 11 to 16 in Hawaii). CHI is the foremost publication venue for work in human-computer interaction (HCI). The paper, titled "For Me or Not for Me? The Ease With Which Teens Navigate Accurate and Inaccurate Personalized Social Media Content," was recognized with an honorable mention.