Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

IEEE Quantum Week  2026  in Toronto From September 13-18, I attended the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE), also known as IEEE Quantum Week, in Toronto, Canada. The main reason for the trip was to present our paper, " Distributed Quantum-Enhanced Optimization: A Topographical Preconditioning Approach for High-Dimensional Search ". QCE was especially interesting for me because essentially everyone there was working somewhere in the quantum computing ecosystem. There were people with backgrounds in physics, computer science, electrical engineering, AI/ML, and pretty much everything in between.  Throughout the week, I attended keynotes and technical sessions, spent too much time walking around the exhibit hall, and had the chance to meet people working across quantum hardware, software, algorithms, HPC, and AI.  My parents and brother also tagged along for the trip, so outside the conference we had some time to explore Toronto tog...

  Sometimes, all it takes is a trip to Norway to confirm that everything is connected. From June 2 to June 11, I traveled with my faculty advisors from Storymodelers to Kristiansand, Norway, to participate in a workshop on the use of modeling as a method for teaching and learning. This workshop was part of an ongoing project at the University of Agder  titled "Modeling for Histories", which is currently in the early stages of testing and has not yet been publicly disseminated. The project is led by Dr. Apostolos Spanos (University of Agder) in collaboration with Dr. Alexandra Lazareva (University of Agder), Dr. Jose J. Padilla ( Old Dominion University ) and Dr. Erika Frydenlund (Old Dominion University). The goal is to explore how model thinking can support history education by helping students move beyond traditional linear narratives and develop a deeper understanding of complex relationships, actors, and processes that shape historical events. This blog is a summary ...

From August 9-13, I attended the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) in Jeju, South Korea, with my co-first author, Bang Nguyen . It was my first time traveling to East Asia, and the trip was full of new experiences and moments that I will cherish forever.  The main reason for traveling to Korea was to present our paper, "ReplicatorBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Replicability in Social and Behavioral Sciences" , which was accepted to the AI4Sciences track of KDD. We also presented the work at the  SciSoc Agents and LLMs workshop.  This work was a collaboration between the  University of Notre Dame , Pennsylvania State University , Old Dominion University , and the  Center for Open Science .  Day 1 The first day started with the SciSoc Agents and LLMs workshop, where we presented our work. It was a nice way to start the conference and also our first opportunity to present ReplicatorBench at KDD. The workshop wa...

  From June 29 to July 1, 2026, I attended the 5th International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation (ICSSI 2026) in Boulder, Colorado. The conference was hosted jointly at the Limelight Hotel and the University of Colorado Boulder . ICSSI brings together researchers who study science itself, including how discoveries happen, how careers are built, how funding shapes research, and how AI is changing all of these. The conference was supported by the US National Science Foundation , the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation , Digital Science , Cevian Labs , and the BioFrontiers Institute . If you are new to the field, “ science of science ” (or metascience ) is the study of science itself, using data, network analysis, and computational methods to understand how research careers, collaborations, and ideas develop over time. Dashun Wang 's The Science of Science is a good introduction if you want an overview before reading the rest of this post. This year's edition felt ...