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 am pleased to share that I have been awarded an Internal Research and Development Grant from the Office of Enterprise Research and Innovation at Old Dominion University in the amount of $50,000, beginning July 1, 2026. The project, titled “Trust-Centered AI Avatars for Accessible Telehealth Support Among Unhoused Populations,” is co-led with Drs. Ginger Watson and Tina Gustin. This project proposes to improve healthcare access for vulnerable and underserved populations by leveraging, enhancing, and evaluating an NSF-funded telehealth kiosk, TeleHSupport, to improve usability through an audio interface and AI-powered interactive avatar. TeleHSupport is a secure, self-service kiosk enabling individuals with limited access to traditional healthcare to receive reliable AI-generated health information and guidance. It delivers safe, evidence-based guidance on chronic disease through text-based conversational AI, with clinically validated content curated by advanced practice nursi...