2025-12-31: Review of WS-DL's 2024

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Better late than never, right? This review of WS-DL's 2024 is incredibly late, but some family concerns delayed my writing and then I never quite got back on track.  We had quite a productive 2024, graduating a record three MS students and four PhD students.  

Students and Faculty

We did not add or lose any faculty this year, but Dr. Jayarathna received tenure early!  Congratulations to Sampath!


We graduated four PhD students:



And we also graduated three MS students, two of whom stayed and entered the PhD program:


We added three new PhD students, two of whom joined from our MS program:



We also had six PhD students advance their status:



Publications and Presentations

To generate our annual publication list, we use our tool "Scholar Groups", which scrapes Google Scholar profiles and merges and deduplicates publications.  As such, our list is limited by the accuracy of Google Scholar, which is pretty good but not perfect.  It looks like for 2024 we published about 28 refereed conference papers, 12 journal articles, and one patent (congratulations, Dr. Ashok!). 



Conferences have mostly returned to f2f, but frequently there are still virtual/remote options. Below is a partial list of trip reports for the events where we presented our work:



Research Presentations and Outreach

In addition to the conferences and workshops listed above where we presented papers, we also had an array of presentations and outreach.  


We hosted the third and final year of our NSF Disinformation Detection and Analytics Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program.  The cohort of the third year was especially successful, as reflected in the mid-point and final presentations. As you can see from the list above, many of the REU projects resulted in publications. 


We also had our 5th annual "Trick or Research" event. Dr. Jayarathna initiated the event five years ago and the entire department has embraced it. 


We also had our fourth annual Research Expo, where we have five PhD students give overviews of their work. 


In addition, we had the following events and outreach:



Software, Data Sets, Services

Our scholarly contributions are not limited to conventional publications or presentations: we also advance the state of the art through releasing software, data sets, and proof-of-concept services & demos.  Some of the software, data sets, and services that we either initially released or made significant updates to in 2024 include: 



Awards and Recognition

Many members of our group received awards and other forms of recognition, a sampling of which includes: 


Funding 

In 2024, we received > $7.8M in six new externally funded grants:



Summary

2024 was a strong year for us: four PhD and three MS students graduated, three new PhD students, and six PhD students advancing their status.  One of our faculty members, Dr. Sampath Jayarathna, received tenure.  We continued to publish in prestigious venues, with about 40 refereed publications.  We helped generate just over $7M in new external funds, from six different grants.  WS-DL continues to grow and thrive, and I am proud of all the members and alumni and their progress in 2024. 


If you would like to join WS-DL, please get in touch.  To get a feel for our recent activities, please review our previous WS-DL annual summaries (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013) and be sure to follow us at @WebSciDL to keep up to date with publications, software releases, trip reports and other activities.  We especially would like to thank all those who have publicly complimented some aspect of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group, our members, and the impact of our research.  



–Michael



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