Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  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...

From March 23rd to the 31st, the  Computer Science Graduate Society (CSGS)  at   Old Dominion University  hosted their Spring 2026  Hackathon . The competition brought together teams across master's and PhD categories to tackle different research topics, mainly in artificial intelligence (AI). Our team, the Attention Bros ( Sandeep Kalari and Dominik Soós ), chose to compete in Track 6: Privacy-Preserving AI, alongside four other great teams in the PhD category. We are grateful to announce that we won first place in the PhD category with our project, PostGuard! This was a fast-paced challenge completed over a single week. Despite the time constraints, we successfully engineered a novel architecture that balances AI utility. In this blog post, we provide an overview of the problem we tackled, the Privacy Paradox and existing methods, our system architecture; and the mathematically proven findings that secured our victory. For more details, you can explo...

The Computer Science Graduate Society (CSGS) of the Old Dominion University organized a Hackathon from October 24 to November 1, 2024. The competition featured three teams from the master's category and three from the PhD category, each presenting innovative projects. Participants chose from five research topics provided by the organizing committee. Two teams from the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) research group participated in the hackathon: Binary Bandits ( David Calano and Dominik Soos ) and our team, Titans ( Himarsha Jayanetti , Kritika Garg , and Kumushini Thennakoon ).  We won the PhD category with our project, "Tracking Political Trends Around the US Presidential Election.” This was a mini project completed within a limited time frame, making it a fast-paced challenge. Despite the constraints, our team tackled various obstacles in collecting and analyzing data. In this blog post, we provide an overview of our project and highlight its key contribution...