Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

This Fall I took the CS 795/895 Natural Language Processing offered by Dr. Ashok . This was a research-focused and project-based course where we were briefly introduced to the tools and techniques in NLP. We learned about Language Models , POS Tagging , Word Embedding , Dialog Systems , along with other topics. Later we were assigned to build up different systems based on our interests. Dr. Ashok encouraged us to build something that would solve some problems that do not exist in the market. Being fascinated with dialog systems and information extraction techniques, I chose to work on building a personal assistant that would help users to find food nutrition values using natural language voice commands. Figure 1: A snapshot of the JSON response returned by the FoodData Central API So what problem Nutri-Assist really solves My target was to make a website for computer browsers as well as a progressive web app for mobile devices just to increase user accessibility. While using the P

Hello  WSDL Blog  readers! My name is  James (Jim/Jimmy) Ecker  and I joined the  Web Science and Digital Libraries  (WS-DL) research group  at  Old Domin ion Un iversity  as a Ph.D student in Fall 2019. I decided to pursue a Ph.D to primarily refine my skills in research, academic writing, and presenting/communicating my work . I am being advised by  Michael Nelson .  In my time at ODU, I have taken  CS891 - Emerging Technologies , where we developed our academic presentation skills with respect to presenting research on various emerging technologies,  CS800 - Research Methods , where we further developed academic presentation and writing skills, and am currently taking  CS895 - Web Archiving Forensics , where we are developing more applied research skills to establish whether information being shared on the internet is authentic. I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from  Florida Southern College  (FSC) in my hometown of  Lakeland, Florida . There, I established the  Fl

This is Xin Wei. I started working with Dr. Wu in the summer of 2020. I received bachelor's degree in Economics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. I also got a Master's degree from Stony Brook University . I am pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University . I transferred from Economics to Computer Science since CS can address more realistic problems compared with Economics. Before joining the  Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Lab , I have published several papers in the field of federated learning, incentivizing mechanism design, and sharing economy. I have published papers in IJCAI , IPDPS , and ICDCS .  These papers study the computation bottleneck problem in federated learning, the incentivizing mechanism considering heterogeneous difficulty levels in sharing economy, and the ideal location of parkings of sharing E-scooters. My research interests mainly lie in machine learning, big data, and NLP. After joining W

Considering the epidemic of COVID-19, when everything was uncertain, in early May 2020, I was accepted to Applied Machine Learning (AML) Summer Research Fellowship Program at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) . I can not be grateful enough to have this excellent opportunity when the world was suffering due to the epidemic caused by Novel Coronavirus. I was offered to work remotely due to the rise of coronavirus cases across the United States. Thus, I started working from home as a Research Intern at LANL on June 1, 2020, under the supervision of Dr. Diane Oyen and Dr. Kari Sentz . The research problem I mainly focused on  Offline Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition — a subcomponent project called Scientific Image Analysis . Remotely Working as a Research Intern Los Alamos National Laboratory is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC). Their top priority is to address research problems that focus on national security and 21st-century scien

Md Javedul Ferdous M.S. in Computer Science, AIUB, 2019 B.S. in  Computer Science and Engineering , EWU, 2016 Hello, I am a doctoral student at Old Dominion University (ODU) , Norfolk, VA. I received a master’s degree in Computer Science at American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB) , Dhaka, Bangladesh. At ODU, I'm working with the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL)  research group under the supervision of Dr. Vikas Ashok . My research projects include human-computer interaction, deep Learning, and algorithm-based problem-solving.  I have research experience in computer vision, deep learning, and the Bayesian algorithm. My master’s thesis research was on classification, computation, and movement of an object and their corresponding relationship. In this project, I used a region-based fully convolutional network and a long and short-term memory-based model. For the dissertation of my bachelor’s degree, I worked on the Bayesian Network to verify the Software Product L

Hello everyone! My name is Sami Uddin (you can call me Rayan!) and I am a member of the  Web Science and Digital Libraries  (WS-DL) research group at  Old Dominion University  (ODU). I have joined ODU in Spring 2020 as a Masters student in the  Department of Computer Science . Also, I am currently working with Dr.  Vikas G Ashok  and exploring the field of web accessibility for people with visual impairment. My first semester here has elapsed pretty quickly. I took CS 595-Intro to Machine Learning  where I learned about various machine learning algorithms and techniques on both supervised and unsupervised learning problems. In addition to that as the course project, Dr. Sun   involved me in one of his projects which gave me the taste of working in the field of bioinformatics. Besides, I had a chance to take  CS 665-Computer Architecture , taught by Dr. Olariu  which enriched my knowledge in hardware and their functionalities, pipelining, parallelism and scheduling, and memory hierarchy

As a new member of WS-DL group, I like to share a bit of my story before joining ODU CS. I have received my BS and MS in Computer Engineering in Iran. I have graduated with a PhD degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 2018.  I was a member of the  Center for the Study of the Digital Libraries (CSDL) group. I have worked with Dr. Frank Shipman . My research interests are in Computer Human Information Interaction, Data Science, Machine Learning and Data Mining, Information Retrieval, Digital Libraries, Web Archive, Digital Data Preservation, and Social Computing. I have years of experience in teaching computer science courses. While I was working on my PhD research remotely, I kept my connection with academia and have taught several different courses at Computer Science department at Virginia Tech for two years (2017-2019). My family and I moved to Norfolk last year (Fall 2019) and I started as a full-time faculty at Physics, Computer Science and Engineering

In the previous blog , I have discussed how tesseract-OCR performed on scanned Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). If you have read my earlier blog , we already saw that the process started with converting the cover page of scanned ETDs into images. Then, tesseract-OCR was applied and saved the extracted result into text files. We also saw that OpenCV OCR failed on scanned ETDs. We could try a widely used open-source tool such as  GROBID , designed for scholarly papers. However , this article  shows that GROBID is intended for extracting bibliographic metadata for born-digital academic papers. Finally, we decided to apply tesseract-OCR to extract the text from the cover page of scanned ETDs. Afterward, a series of regular expressions (RegEx) was performed to extract seven metadata fields, including titles, authors, academic-programs, institutions, advisors, and years. In this blog, I will introduce how RegEx can be a powerful tool to quickly parse the text with patterns.