Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I am excited to share that our proposal, " REU Site: Human-AI Interaction and Evaluation in Web and Information Systems ," has been funded by the National Science Foundation . This is a renewal of our previous NSF REU grant, " Disinformation Detection and Analytics ." The renewal provides $372,000 to support at least eight undergraduate students each year in conducting on-site research at Old Dominion University and the Virginia Modeling, Analytics, and Simulation Center ( VMASC ) during the summers of 2027–2029.  As AI technologies proliferate across web platforms and information systems, the nature of human-computer interaction is fundamentally changing: users increasingly engage with and rely on adaptive, generative, and often opaque AI agents such as chatbots. This shift makes human-AI interaction (HAI) a critical research topic, as researchers must now understand and shape how humans and AI systems communicate, collaborate, build trust, and share decision-makin...

In July 2026, Old Dominion University Research Foundation received an award from the National Science Foundation. The award, led by Dr. Jian Wu and Dr. Sampath Jayarathna , will support up to 5 U.S.-based doctoral students to attend the Doctoral Consortium (DC) of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) from 2026 to 2028.  JCDL is the premier international conference focused on digital libraries and their associated organizational, practical, social, and technical issues. The Doctoral Consortium (DC) workshop, an integral part of the conference, is typically scheduled one day before the main conference. In the DC, doctoral students in related disciplines — including but not limited to Computer Science, Information Science, Library Science, and Web Science — who are in the early stages of their dissertation work submit formal papers outlining the motivation, structure, research plans, and expected results of their dissertations for critical review. Accepted p...

  From June 29 to July 1, 2026, I attended the 5th International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation (ICSSI 2026) in Boulder, Colorado. The conference was hosted jointly at the Limelight Hotel and the University of Colorado Boulder . ICSSI brings together researchers who study science itself, including how discoveries happen, how careers are built, how funding shapes research, and how AI is changing all of these. The conference was supported by the US National Science Foundation , the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation , Digital Science , Cevian Labs , and the BioFrontiers Institute . If you are new to the field, “ science of science ” (or metascience ) is the study of science itself, using data, network analysis, and computational methods to understand how research careers, collaborations, and ideas develop over time. Dashun Wang 's The Science of Science is a good introduction if you want an overview before reading the rest of this post. This year's edition felt ...

  This summer, I had the opportunity to work as a visiting student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) , where I worked in the Learning, Innovation, and Technology Lab (LIT Lab) supervised by Dr. Bertrand Schneider . The LIT Lab investigates how people learn and collaborate in learning environments. They use advanced sensing technologies and data-driven methods to measure attention, behavior, and interactions. HGSE is a leading institution dedicated to advancing educational research and innovation through interdisciplinary approaches that combine education, technology, and learning sciences. The internship provided an opportunity to explore new methods, tools, and measures used to study collaborative learning, while also contributing to a new research project.  My internship was an eight-week program, and during my visit I collaborated closely with Dr. Schneider on the project “Exploring the trade-offs between wearable eye-tracking and computer vision technol...