2025-01-27: ODU CS 2024 Trick-or-Research Event Recap

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The Department of Computer Science (CS) at Old Dominion University (ODU) celebrated its sixth annual Trick-or-Research event on October 31, 2024, blending Halloween festivities with academic exploration. Check out our previous Trick-or-Research blog posts here: 2021, 2022, 2023. This unique event brought together faculty, staff, and students to showcase the department's cutting-edge research and foster new collaborations. Designed especially to introduce undergraduate students to the vibrant research opportunities within the department, Trick-or-Research featured interactive lab tours, engaging demonstrations, and opportunities to network with professors and join research groups. Participants explored CS research labs in person at the E.V. Williams Engineering & Computational Sciences Building (E&CSB) and Dragas Hall or virtually via Gather.town. Adding to the festive spirit, students dressed up in creative Halloween costumes, ranging from Demon Slayer Rengoku Kyoujuro to the Statue of Liberty, while competing for CS swag and prizes, making the event both academically enriching and spookily fun.

Lab Visits


The Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) group (@WebSciDL), led by Dr. Michael Nelson and Dr. Michele Weigle, presented their research on web archiving. Group members were eager to answer questions and engage with visitors. Several posters provided additional insights into the research topics being explored by students. Attendees could also learn about graduate-level Spring 2025 CS courses. The WS-DL group investigates all aspects of the web, including machine-machine and human-machine interfaces. Their research spans web archiving, web science, social media, digital preservation, human-computer interaction, accessibility, information visualization, natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and mining scholarly data.

The Lab for Applied Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Systems (LAMP-SYS) room was not one to miss.  Dr. Jian Wu was there and ready to greet visitors who wanted to know more about his research. The lab presented their work on entity extraction, mining electronic documents, and computational reproducibility in deep learning. The lab's mission is to apply machine learning and deep learning techniques in real-world problems. Focusing on building systems to solve multidisciplinary problems using building blocks in natural language processing, scholarly big data, digital libraries, and information retrieval.

The Neuro Information Retrieval and Data Science (NIRDS) lab led by Dr. Sampath Jayarathna was another cool spot. Students from the NIRDS lab presented their eye tracking research, demonstrated cool eye trackers, EEG devices, wearable sensors, and drones. They also explained some of their work on applying such technology to solve real-world problems. The NIRDS lab focuses on multidisciplinary research activities towards integration of perception, cognition and psychophysiological measurements (e.g., eye tracking, EEG, and wearable sensors).

The Accessible Computing group, led by Dr. Vikas Ashok, also showcased their work during this year's Trick-or-Research event. The team engaged with students visiting their exhibit, answering questions and sharing insights into their research. The lab focuses on developing intelligent interactive systems designed to enhance the user experience for individuals with visual impairments. Their work emphasizes improving human-computer interaction through user-friendly interfaces and advanced image-to-speech tools. During the event, they demonstrated these tools and highlighted how they enhance web browsing for visually impaired users.

The Bioinformatics lab, led by Dr. Jing He, showcased research posters highlighting their work in computational biology and bioinformatics. Their projects focus on developing computational methods and tools to analyze complex biological data, including genomic sequences, protein structures, and 3D molecular images. They also apply machine learning techniques to address challenges in medicine and health.

The High Performance Scientific Computing Team for Efficient Research Simulations (HiPSTERS) group, led by Dr. Desh Ranjan and Dr. Mohammad Zubair, also welcomed students during the Trick-or-Research event.  They offered a presentation introducing guests to HiPSTERS' research, travel opportunities, and interactive stations. The group showcased innovative mathematical methods to enhance interdisciplinary research in high-performance computing (HPC) environments. They also demonstrated their use of GPU programming to simulate coherent synchrotron radiation and particle collider beam dynamics.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Applications research group, led by Dr. Yaohang Li, also showcased their work  during the Trick-or-Research event. Visitors explored research posters and connected with others who shared similar interests. The group presented their work on machine learning-based physics event generation and particle production simulations while showcasing ongoing deep learning research. Their projects include enhancing protein crystallization classification, developing machine learning algorithms for stock market analysis, and applying generative models to simulate particle physics events.

The Hands-On lab, established by Ajay Gupta, showcased their research to visiting students during the event. The group focuses on diverse areas, including real-time monitoring of the human body using sensors and wearables, developing complex end-to-end systems for collecting and analyzing health-related data, designing and implementing learning management portals, and creating mobile applications for the medical field.

The Data Mining lab, led by Dr. Lusi Li, shared their research on data mining, machine learning, and optimization theory. Their work focuses on areas such as online machine learning, representation learning, transfer learning, multi-view learning, recommender systems, and explainable AI. Visitors had the opportunity to explore these cutting-edge topics and the lab’s projects.

The Internet Security Research lab, led by Dr. Shuai Hao, presented their research on networking and security. Their work focuses on using measurement, empirical studies, and data-driven approaches to explore internet infrastructure, security and privacy of networking systems, web security, and cybercrime.

Summary

This year’s Trick-or-Research brought together creativity, learning, and community in an engaging hybrid format. With opportunities to explore innovative projects, connect with faculty, and discover research paths, the event highlighted the dynamic work happening in ODU's CS department. Whether in person or online, attendees left inspired and informed. If you couldn’t join this time, be sure to look out for next year’s event!

- Kritika Garg (@kritika_garg)

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