NDLTD announced the winner of the 2023 Innovative ETD Award at ETD2023, the 26th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Gujarat, India.
Aman Ahuja won the award for his dissertation, “Analyzing and Navigating Electronic Theses and Dissertations.” The Innovative ETD Award supports student efforts to transform the genre of the dissertation through the use of innovative research data management techniques and software to create multimedia ETDs.
Ahuja’s dissertation provides a technical framework to expand the access to the content of millions of published theses which are constrained in their usability and usefulness by the portable document format (PDF). Current digital libraries are institutional repositories with the objective being content archiving, they often lack end-user services needed to make this valuable data useful for the scholarly community. To effectively utilize such data to address the information needs of users, digital libraries should support various end-user services such as document search and browsing, document recommendation, as well as services to make navigation of long PDF documents easier and accessible. Ahuja’s research and dissertation directly addresses these concerns in creative and beneficial ways.
Dr. Ahuja has transitioned to Seattle, Washington and is working with DocuSign.
The dissertation of Dr. Aman Ahuja is available through the thesis and dissertation repository of Virginia Tech at http://hdl.handle.net/10919/115817. See also a demonstration of how it produces HTML results, and a related user manual. Additional news stories were posted by the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and the Sanghani Center for AI and Data Analytics.
Aman Ahuja’s Award Acceptance Video:
