Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

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...

https://www.odu.edu/research/strategic-research-areas   ODU published its " Strategic Research Areas " last April, and I've been meaning to comment on it for a while. First, it hasn't been well messaged (yet), as reflected by an informal poll of my WSDL peers.  Second, I'm reaching the stage in my career where I read with enthusiasm "strategy" and "policy" documents. So what makes this strategy statement different from previous iterations?  First, it uniquely describes ODU.  Instead of a collection of generic terms like "impact", "development", "innovation", etc., the four thrusts identified capture many of ODU's current activities and are areas of ODU's comparative and competitive advantage . The official document has more eloquent language justifying the four thrusts, but mostly it comes down to the geography and resulting industry and demographics of the Hampton Roads region: Coastal Resilience: we h...

I am excited to announce that Old Dominion University (ODU) is part of the multi-university grant awarded by the Open Philanthropy Foundation  to support the development of a systematic benchmark assessing how effectively large language models (LLMs) can evaluate, replicate, and conduct scientific research. The leading institution is the Center for Open Science (CoS, Dr. Brian Nosek and Dr. Tim Errington ) and the participation institutions are Pennsylvania State University ( Dr. Sarah Rajtmajer , Dr. Qingyun Wu ), Notre Dame University ( Dr. Meng Jiang ), and ODU ( Dr. Jian Wu , myself).  The team will conduct a test of whether LLMs are capable of determining whether claims are true or false. Here a claim means a statement that conveys a research finding in a scientific paper. Our operationalization of this question is whether LLMs can assess a scientific paper and predict whether primary findings would replicate or reproduce successfully in an independent test. In the fund...

Dr. Erika Frydenlund , Melissa Miller-Felton and I attended the Air Force Office of Scientific Research ( @AFOSR ) 2024 Trust and Influence Program Review on August 12-16, 2024 in Dayton, Ohio. We were invited because of our Minerva Research Initiative Grant, “ What's Missing? Innovating Interdisciplinary Methods for Hard-to-Reach Environments ” awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2022 (described in a previous blog post by Dr. Erika Frydenlund when this grant was first awarded). Although the research conducted is public, this meeting was not recorded.   On the first day, the afternoon keynote was given by Dr. Samuel Segun , senior researcher at Global Center on AI Governance . He spoke on the topic “Building responsible & trustworthy AI: Operationalizing Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) Practice,” where he underscored the critical need for trust in AI systems. Dr. Segun motivated the importance of trusting AI systems by asking, 'Who is responsible?...