Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  The Department of Computer Science (CS) at Old Dominion University (ODU) hosted its annual Trick-or-Research event on October 31, 2025 , blending academic exploration with Halloween-inspired creativity. Check out our previous Trick-or-Research blog posts for 2021 , 2022 , 2023 , and 2024 . Building on the success of previous years, this event brought together faculty, staff, and students to showcase the department’s cutting-edge research and encourage new collaborations. Designed especially to introduce undergraduate students to the wide range of research opportunities within the department, Trick-or-Research featured interactive lab tours, engaging demonstrations, and opportunities to network with professors and join research groups. 🎃 Trick or Research! | ODU CS Lab Tours 2025 👩‍💻👻 Tour CS labs, meet faculty & grad students, and win prizes! — Computer Science Graduate Society - ODU (@CSGS_ODU) October 13, 2025 Participants explored CS research labs in person at The...

Hello, I am  Dommanige Chameli Dilshani Menike. I came to ODU from Sri Lanka. I am Dr. Wu ’s new Ph.D. student in the LAMP-SYS Lab . Currently, I am working on a project related to table Data extraction under Dr. Wu’s guidance, and I will be working as both a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) and a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) in Fall 2025.  I earned my BSc Honors degree in Computer Science from the University of Peradeniya . My core subjects were Computer Science, Mathematics, and Statistics. When I was choosing an undergraduate research topic, I realized that natural language processing (NLP) was my forte. After all, that interest and curiosity are what brought me here. My final-year research project, ' Towards Cyberbullying Identification on Social Media Using Text and Emojis ,' provided an excellent opportunity to deepen my understanding of advanced Machine Learning and NLP concepts. The abstract was presented at the 8th International Conference of the Association of...

We were honored to host Dr. Michael Herzog  and his colleague Stefan Puest from Magdeburg-Stendal University for his annual visit to Hampton Roads . During his visit, he engaged with students and faculty of the NIRDS Lab and WS-DL group , including Dr. Faryaneh Poursardar , Dr. Michael Nelson , and Dr. Sampath Jayarathna . The visit reinforced our commitment to global academic collaboration and provided a meaningful platform for showcasing student-led research at the intersection of technology, society, and human behavior. Nirdslab and WS-DL group Students Research Presentation and Demonstration The day featured hands-on demonstrations of ongoing projects, including groundbreaking work in eye-tracking research by students Lawrence, Yasasi, Bhanuka, Kumushini, and James. Lawrence  presented his research on human-AI teaming, highlighting how electrodermal responses, heart rate, and speech data can be integrated using custom-built sensors—including the Rosetta Stone and vario...

The Department of Computer Science (CS) at Old Dominion University (ODU) celebrated its sixth annual Trick-or-Research event on October 31, 2024, blending Halloween festivities with academic exploration. Check out our previous Trick-or-Research blog posts here: 2021 , 2022 , 2023 . This unique event brought together faculty, staff, and students to showcase the department's cutting-edge research and foster new collaborations. Designed especially to introduce undergraduate students to the vibrant research opportunities within the department, Trick-or-Research featured interactive lab tours, engaging demonstrations, and opportunities to network with professors and join research groups. Participants explored CS research labs in person at the E.V. Williams Engineering & Computational Sciences Building (E&CSB) and Dragas Hall or virtually via Gather.town . Adding to the festive spirit, students dressed up in creative Halloween costumes, ranging from Demon Slayer Rengoku Kyouj...

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...