Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On June 23, 2026,  we  held our sixth annual  WS-DL Research Expo .   We continued the same format as the prior years ( 2025 ,  2024 ,  2023 ,  2022  &  2021 ), with one student from each WS-DL professor giving a short overview of their research.  Links to all the materials (slides, papers, software, data) are gathered in the GitHub  repo , but repeated here are the links for the students and their presentations:   Brian Llinas :  RAG-TEC: Extracting and Classifying Topics in Digital News Collections Using LLMs Lawrence Obiuwevwi :  Cognitive Prosthetic: An AI-Enabled Multimodal System for Episodic Recall in Knowledge Work Akshay Kolgar Nayak :  Contextual Scaffolding and Self-Efficacy: Supporting Computer Skill Development among Blind Learners in India Rochana Obadage :  CC30k: A Citation Contexts Dataset for Reproducibility-Oriented Sentiment Analysis Himarsha Jayanetti :  Infrastructure for ...

I was born in a small town to two schoolteachers who believed education was not just a profession but a purpose. Growing up in such an environment meant that learning was never forced; it was simply part of everyday life, and curiosity was always encouraged rather than questioned. Books were treated like companions in our home, and questions were welcomed more than answers. My father, a mathematics teacher and statistics topper, did not just teach numbers. He taught me how to see patterns in the world, how to question things, and how to stay curious. He had a way of turning ordinary moments into lessons, showing me that knowledge was not confined to classrooms but hidden in everything around us. Conversations at home often revolved around ideas, discipline, perseverance, and integrity, quietly shaping my mindset long before I understood their value. That atmosphere made me believe that effort mattered more than circumstance and that consistency could take a person farther than talent a...

In the Spring 2026 semester at Old Dominion University (ODU), I taught CS 450 (Undergrad) / CS 550 (Graduate): Database Concepts . The course was fully online, with synchronous live Zoom sessions held twice a week. The attendance was not mandatory but strongly encouraged. All lectures were recorded and made available for students to access whenever needed. Figure 1: Canvas course page for CS 450/550: Database Concepts Through this blog post, I want to share my experience of teaching a senior-level undergraduate/graduate course for the first time, the behind-the-scenes realities of course preparation through to the end of the course, and how student feedback actively shaped the course as it progressed.  Since the course had been taught previously by other instructors, materials were already available, which made things easier. Rather than building everything from scratch, I started by copying over the existing course structure and then carefully updating it to align with the current...