Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

In collaboration with Dr. Alexander Nwala at William & Mary and Dr. Sawood Alam at the Internet Archive , we ( Himarsha R. Jayanetti , Dr. Michael L. Nelson , and Dr. Michele C. Weigle ) at the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group at Old Dominion University received an award of $750,000 in federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) beginning in August 2026. The award supports the project, “CiteCast: Linking US local & national television news to cited web resources” .  The project focuses on identifying and preserving web resources referenced in archived U.S. local and national television news. Television news frequently points viewers to websites, social media posts, and other online resources, but those resources can change or disappear over time. The goal of this is to help connect these references in television archives with the corresponding web resources and preserve them for future research. Figure 1: Example TV ...

  The Computer Science Graduate Society (CSGS) was founded in 2019 by Eleni Adam and Yasha Ravindra as the primary student body representing both master’s and PhD students in Computer Science at Old Dominion University . CSGS helps students navigate their graduate programs while serving as a bridge between the student body and the department . Its mission is to enrich the academic, professional, and social experiences of master’s and doctoral students while building a supportive community where members can grow personally and professionally throughout their graduate journey. I served as CSGS President during the 2025/26 academic year. Taking on that role alongside my responsibilities as a graduate student gave me a different perspective on what it means to lead a student organization while balancing research, coursework, responsibilities as a teaching assistant, and a dissertation. I wanted to reflect on that experience here, not simply as a record of what we did, but as an ho...

https://xkcd.com/2501/ Eight courses from the Web Science and Digital Libraries ( WS-DL ) Group will be offered for Fall 2026.  The classes will be a mixture of asynchronous and f2.  C S 418/518 Web Programming, Ms.  Nasreen Muhammad Arif , Tuesdays & Thursdays 3-4:15  Topics : MySQL, React, Express.js, NodeJS, MVC (Model-View-Control), Search Engines, GitHub   C S 432/532 Web Science,  Ms.  Nasreen Muhammad Arif , asynchronous   Topics : Python, R, D3, ML, and IR.   CS 620 Intro to Data Science & Analytics, Tuesdays & Thursdays 3-4:15,  Dr.  Sampath Jayarathna , and asynchronous (8 week session starting in October), Dr.  Bhanuka Mahanama Topics : Python, Pandas, NumPy, NoSQL, Data Wrangling, ML, Colab. CS 625 Data Visualization ,  Dr.  Bhanuka Mahanama , Web, asynchronous  Topics : Tableau, Python Seaborn, Matplotlib, Vega-Lite, Observable, Markdown, OpenRefine, data cleaning, visual p...

From August 9-13, I attended the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) in Jeju, South Korea, with my co-first author, Bang Nguyen . It was my first time traveling to East Asia, and the trip was full of new experiences and moments that I will cherish forever.  The main reason for traveling to Korea was to present our paper, "ReplicatorBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Replicability in Social and Behavioral Sciences" , which was accepted to the AI4Sciences track of KDD. We also presented the work at the  SciSoc Agents and LLMs workshop.  This work was a collaboration between the  University of Notre Dame , Pennsylvania State University , Old Dominion University , and the  Center for Open Science .  Day 1 The first day started with the SciSoc Agents and LLMs workshop, where we presented our work. It was a nice way to start the conference and also our first opportunity to present ReplicatorBench at KDD. The workshop wa...

In Summer 2026, I was honored to have the opportunity of being a visiting researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) , a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston. I worked at the Center of Education Research, Technology, and Innovation (CERTAIN) research center in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care, & Pain Medicine , under the supervision of Dr. Jacqueline Hannan . CERTAIN research center focuses on educational research aimed at understanding and improving how healthcare professionals learn and train. CERTAIN combines educational research with emerging technologies to develop and evaluate new approaches to medical training and assessment. Its work includes both simulation-based training and clinical skills development.  A particularly exciting aspect of the CERTAIN’s work is its use of realistic training environments. Residents participate in virtual reality activities, simulation-lab sessions, and in-situ training conducted directly in o...