Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

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 variou...

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...

One day, as I sat playing Candy Crush for the hundredth time on the sofa, I thought, "I could be doing something more productive with my spare time." While there were probably hundreds of other things I could have considered, this made me start contemplating my third return to college to pursue a doctoral degree. A pretty decent tuition assistance program provided by my employer made the thought even more tempting. Therefore, I decided to proceed with submitting an application for graduate school. I also began looking into  ongoing research  at Old Dominion University  (ODU)  and contacted some professors as potential advisors.  I was at Disney World in Florida with my family in August 2016 when I took a pause from the day's activities to check email on my iPhone. At that time, I saw the email informing me that I had been accepted into the Computer Science PhD program at ODU. Although I applied earlier in the year, some recent unfortunate events made me question...

  The REU summer cohort of 2024, along with ODU faculty and graduate students,  at the REU orientation on May 24th, 2024, at the Computer Science Department. Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program Mis and disinformation can cause real damage in societies by confusing people and rallying individuals, groups, and communities toward harmful actions.  Disinformation  is false or misleading information spread with the intention to deceive or cause harm. It can appear in the form of fabricated or deliberately manipulated audio/visual content, intentionally created conspiracy theories, or rumors spread to harm or cause distrust.   Misinformation , on the other hand, is information that is shared without the intent to manipulate people. This includes sharing rumors or false information before verifying their accuracy, unintentional mistakes such as inaccurate photo captions, dates, statistics, and translations, or situations where satire is mistakenly taken as ...