Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: The Life-Cycle of a Vulnerability (Source: Horawalavithana) Cyber security attacks can be enabled by the fact that many widely-used applications share open-source libraries. As a result, a vulnerability or software weakness in one of these libraries can have far reaching impact. Once discovered, security experts may announce the vulnerability on a variety of forums, blogs, and social media sites. Cyber-adversaries  might also explore these public information channels and private discussion threads on the dark web to identify potential attack targets and ways to exploit them. In their 2019 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI '19) paper, " Mentions of Security Vulnerabilities on Reddit, Twitter and GitHub ", Sameera Horawalavithana , Abhishek Bhattacharjee , Renhao Liu , Nazim Choudhury , Lawrence O. Hall , and Adriana Iamnitchi present a quantitative analysis of user-generated content related to security vulnerabilities on th

I am delighted that my proposal entitled "Toward Knowledge Extraction: Finding Datasets, Methods, and Tools Adopted in Research Papers" is awarded under the Program for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship ( PURS ) by the Old Dominion University Perry Honors College Undergraduate Research Program, in cooperation with the ODU Office of Research. With the increasing volumes of publications in all academic fields, researchers are under great pressure to read and digest research papers that deliver existing and new discoveries, even in niche domains. With the advancement of natural language processing (NLP) techniques in the last decade, it is possible to build frameworks to process free textual content to extract key facts (datasets, methods, and tools) from research papers. The goal of this project is to develop a machine learning framework to automatically extract datasets, methods, and tools from research papers in Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CIS

Students, professors, industry experts, and others came to Beijing to attend the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) . This was the first time CIKM had accepted a long paper from the Old Dominion University Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (WS-DL) and I was happy to represent us at this prestigious conference. CIKM is different from some of our other conference destinations. CIKM's focus spans all forms of information and knowledge, leading to a high diversity in submission topics. The conference organizers classified CIKM papers into topics including advertising, user modeling, urban systems, knowledge graphs, information retrieval, data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, social media, health care, privacy, and security. There were multiple tracks going in five different rooms across three days. There were 202 long papers, 107 short papers, 38 applied research papers, and 26 demos.

The second annual STEAM on Spectrum event was held at the Old Dominion University (ODU) Virginia Modeling Analysis & Simulation Center (VMASC) in Suffolk, VA on October 12, 2019.  All of my students ( @NirdsLab ) are at @vmasc_odu for the "STEAM on Spectrum 2019" #inclusive event for Autistic kids. Nearly 200 participants and 50+ volunteers. @WebSciDL @oducs @ODUSCI @sheissheba @DynamicMelody1 @LalitaSharkey @yasithmilinda @Gavindya2 @mahanama94 pic.twitter.com/f131qYGjkA — Sampath Jayarathna (@OpenMaze) October 12, 2019 The event, sponsored by IEEE Hampton Roads Section and the VMASC Industry Association, intended to provide inclusive, accessible resources and activities related to science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM), and encourage students to pursue careers in the STEAM areas.  Event organizers included VMASC, ODU, and the Mea'Alofa Autism Support Center . It is a beautiful day @vmasc_odu with a great turnout for today