Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

From August 9-13, I attended the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) in Jeju, South Korea, with my co-first author, Bang Nguyen . It was my first time traveling to East Asia, and the trip was full of new experiences and moments that I will cherish forever.  The main reason for traveling to Korea was to present our paper, "ReplicatorBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Replicability in Social and Behavioral Sciences" , which was accepted to the AI4Sciences track of KDD. We also presented the work at the  SciSoc Agents and LLMs workshop.  This work was a collaboration between the  University of Notre Dame , Pennsylvania State University , Old Dominion University , and the  Center for Open Science .  Day 1 The first day started with the SciSoc Agents and LLMs workshop, where we presented our work. It was a nice way to start the conference and also our first opportunity to present ReplicatorBench at KDD. The workshop wa...

In Summer 2026, I was honored to have the opportunity of being a visiting researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) , a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston. I worked at the Center of Education Research, Technology, and Innovation (CERTAIN) research center in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care, & Pain Medicine , under the supervision of Dr. Jacqueline Hannan . CERTAIN research center focuses on educational research aimed at understanding and improving how healthcare professionals learn and train. CERTAIN combines educational research with emerging technologies to develop and evaluate new approaches to medical training and assessment. Its work includes both simulation-based training and clinical skills development.  A particularly exciting aspect of the CERTAIN’s work is its use of realistic training environments. Residents participate in virtual reality activities, simulation-lab sessions, and in-situ training conducted directly in o...

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 ...