Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  DAAD RISE Professional scholarship holders at RISE Professional conference in Kassel, Germany This summer, I had the privilege of being selected for the RISE (Research Internships in Science and Engineering) Professional program organized by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) . During the RISE Professional research internship, I worked at  Petanux GmbH in Bonn, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Mahdi Bohlouli . DAAD RISE has two programs that offer summer research internships in Germany to students from the North America, Great Britain, and Ireland. RISE Germany program offers internships to undergraduate students at German universities and research institutions, while RISE Professional program offers internships to graduate students at German companies and research institutions with strong relations to the industry. This year, 246 North American, British, and Irish students applied for 122 internship positions and 70 scholarships were awarded for RISE Pro...

  Wrapping up my internship with a presentation at Fermilab I was fortunate to spend the summer interning at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory  under the supervision of Dr. Marc Paterno. The whole experience was full of firsts. I had never been to Chicago or even Illinois before, and I had never seen a bison or a particle accelerator in real life. These are the kinds of things you only hear about on the news back in Europe.  At first, the dorm I was placed in felt a bit cramped. But over time, I got to know many interesting people from all sorts of backgrounds, and somehow my room didn't feel small anymore. How PSO finds the global minimum For my project, we developed an efficient GPU-based multidimensional global optimization algorithm, which has been accepted to HiPC 2025 . It is a novel hybrid method that has two main phases: particle swarm optimization for global search and then a local refinement phase with BFGS, and automatic differentiation. It outperforms exis...

Hello! My name is  Pasindu Sankalpa , and I am an international student from Sri Lanka. In Fall 2025, I joined the  NIRDS Lab  (Neuro-Information Retrieval and Data Science Lab) in  WS-DL  (Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group) at  Old Dominion University  as a PhD student under the supervision of  Dr. Sampath Jayarathna . In December 2024, I graduated with a B.Sc. Engineering (Hons) degree in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering from the  University of Moratuwa , earning First-Class Honors. During my undergraduate studies, my final-year research project focused on “ Deep Learning–based Drone Classification by Utilizing Radar Cross Section Signatures ”, supervised by  Dr. Sampath Perera . This work addressed the limitations of traditional drone detection techniques by proposing a multi-modal deep learning approach for real-time detection and classification.  This paper has been submitted for publication. Alongsid...

         The “reproducibility crisis” in scientific research refers to growing concerns over the reliability and credibility of published findings, in many fields including biomedical, behavioral, and the life sciences ( Laraway et al. 2019 , Fidler et al. 2021 ). Over the past decade, large-scale reproducibility projects revealed failures to replicate findings. For example, in 2015 the Open Science Collaboration reported that a larger portion of replicated studies produced weaker evidence for the original findings despite using the same materials. Similarly, in fields like machine learning researchers may publish impressive new methods, but if others can’t reproduce the results, it hinders progress. Therefore, reproducibility matters. It’s science’s version of fact-checking. In this blog, we’ll break down our recent effort to reproduce the results of the paper Network Deconvolution by Ye et al. (hereafter, "original study"), published in 2020, which claime...