December 6, 2007: We have launched the new DLRL website. Some parts are still being reconstructed, so please bear with us till we get all parts back up and running!

August 22, 2007: The SIGIR (Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval) conference, the preeminent conference in information retrieval, announced today that Wensi Xi, who earned his PhD in the Digital Library Research Lab in 2006, is the center of the SIGIR universe.

To determine this, they analysed all SIGIR proceedings and built a social network in which SIGIR authors are the nodes and edges are added between nodes if two authors co-authored a SIGIR paper together. The author that is most central in the network is the one that has the shortest average distance to all other authors, where the distance is 1 if two authors wrote a SIGIR paper together, it is 2 if the first author wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with the second author, etc. Dr. Xi's wide career experience (he worked at Microsoft, and now works for Google), plus his large number of academic co-authors, no doubt contributed to his "win".
The trophy can be viewed here.

December 20, 2006. Two DLRL alumni recently received career grants from CNPq, Brazil. Marcos André Gonçalves finished his PhD with us, as follows:

Nov. 2004, PhD dissertation, Marcos André Gonçalves, "Streams, Structures, Spaces,Scenarios, and Societies (5S): A Formal Digital Library Framework and Its Applications",

While here, Dr. Gonçalves had a CNPq fellowship, then an AOL fellowship. He won the Virginia Tech computer science research award for doctoral students. He was selected in a national competition for a tenure track position at one of the best universities in Brazil, UFMG. He has been awarded several grants since then.

The other alumni is Ricardo da Silva Torres. Dr. Torres was a visiting scholar at the DLRL for the last year of his doctoral work, and then returned to Brazil to defend. He now has a tenure track faculty position at UNICAMP, a prestigious Brazilian university. Dr. Torres continues to collaborate with the DLRL, and he visits periodically in that regard.