Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  In January 2021, I began a journey that would span nearly five years , three children, countless late nights, and a singular focus: teaching machines to extract data from complex scientific tables with confidence—and to know when they're uncertain. On October 29, 2025, I successfully defended my dissertation titled "SCITEUQ: Toward Uncertainty-Aware Complex Scientific Table Data Extraction and Understanding" at Old Dominion University . This milestone represents not just the culmination of intensive research but a testament to perseverance, family support, and the power of focused determination. Finding My Path at LAMP-SYS When I joined the Lab for Applied Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Systems (LAMP-SYS) , part of ODU's Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (WSDL) under the guidance of Dr. Jian Wu , I knew exactly what problem I wanted to solve: making scientific table data extraction both accurate and trustworthy through uncertai...

The primary objective of this trip was to present our work at the 32nd IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing and Data Analytics (HiPC 2025) held from December 17th to 20th in Hyderabad, India. The work presented was primarily developed during my summer internship at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory  (Fermilab) under the supervision of Dr. Marc Paterno .  This was only the second conference I have ever attended, with my first being ACM Hypertext in September , which focused on hypertext and web-based systems. Having that experience as a reference point made it easier to navigate HiPC, which also highlighted how different large international conferences can feel in terms of scale, structure, and research focus.  This trip can be broken down into two main parts: a short sightseeing visit to Delhi and Agra, followed by the conference in Hyderabad.  Delhi and Agra The trip started with a couple of days in New Delhi . Since I had not been to th...

Figure 1: (a) Difficulties in understanding posts due to missing or assumed context, (b) need for standardization of posts (Figure 1  in  M.J. Ferdous et al.). Introduction Social media sites such as Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube play a central role in how people exchange ideas, debate current issues, and build communities, with threaded discussions serving as a key mechanism for interaction across these platforms. These platforms are designed around visual structures: nested replies, indentation, spacing, and visual grouping allow sighted users to quickly scan conversations, identify relationships between posts, and decide where to engage. For blind users who rely on screen readers, accessing these conversations involves a fundamentally different interaction model. As shown in the accompanying video, screen readers present content linearly, reading one element at a time while the user moves through posts and interface elements using keyboard commands such as Tab and Shift+Tab...

  The  ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)  is the premier venue for research at the intersection of computing and accessibility. It brings together a diverse community of scholars, practitioners, and designers who are dedicated to advancing technologies that empower people with disabilities. This year, the  26th ASSETS Conference (ASSETS 2024)  was held in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, from October 27 to 30, 2024. In this blog post, I highlight our paper, “ Understanding Low Vision Graphical Perception of Bar Charts ”, which examines how individuals with low vision interpret bar charts using screen magnifiers. Our study found that low-vision users face frequent challenges when reading charts, including visual blur, difficulty tracking between elements, and confusion caused by distractor bars. Perception errors were higher when bars were unaligned, stacked, or closely spaced. In some cases, design choices that typica...

      The  IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS)  is the premier forum for research in visualization and visual analytics. It brings together a global community of scholars, practitioners, and designers committed to advancing visual methods for exploring, analyzing, and communicating data. This year, the 35th IEEE  VIS Conference (VIS 2024)  was held in St. Pete Beach, Florida, USA, from October 13 to 18, 2024. In this blog post, I highlight my work “ Towards Enhancing Low Vision Usability of Data Charts on Smartphones ,” which addresses the accessibility challenges faced by low-vision users when interacting with data charts on mobile devices and introduces GraphLite, a mobile assistive technology that transforms static charts into customizable interactive visualizations. Motivation Data charts are a powerful way to communicate trends, comparisons, and summaries, and they are now commonly found across news articles, financial tools, health dashboards, an...