Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

This year, the 30th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries ( #TPDL2026 ) was held in the beautiful town of Faro, Portugal from September 22-25, 2026. We, Himarsha Jayanetti and Skanda Siva, attended the conference in person to present our paper titled “ Nobody Truly Agrees on Sentiment: Humans, Bespoke Tools, and LLMs Struggle with Social Media Texts ”, co-authored with our advisors, Michele C. Weigle , Michael L. Nelson , and Shuai Hao , all from the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University . InfoVis-DL Workshop The first day of the conference was dedicated to workshops and the Doctoral Consortium. We attended the InfoVis-DL 2026 workshop titled “Information Visualization in Digital Libraries: Multi-modal Applications to Cultural Heritage Collections”, which explored how information visualization can help libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions make complex digital collections more accessible and meaningf...

VDMC and Q.E.D. Systems teams at the Q.E.D. Center for Training and Development. How do we really know when someone has learned a skilled trade? Is completing a task enough, or should we also understand how the person performed it, where they struggled, what demanded their attention, and how their performance changed as they gained experience? These questions came to life during a recent hands-on maritime workforce visit to Q.E.D. Systems, Inc ., by members of the Virginia Digital Maritime Center (VDMC) Workforce Innovation team. For the day, we stepped away from the roles we normally hold as researchers, developers, and workforce professionals and became novice maritime trainees. Instead of only discussing workforce training and performance from the outside, we experienced parts of the learning process firsthand. The experience gave us an opportunity to learn several maritime skilled trades firsthand while also observing how skills are introduced, practiced, coached, and ultimately a...

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...