About

The Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group at Old Dominion University performs research in web archiving, web science, digital libraries, neuro-information retrieval, social media, digital preservation, human-computer interaction, information visualization, natural language processing, accessibility, and mining scholarly data.

Our alumni have been hired by the Internet Archive, MITRE, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and have been faculty and/or researchers at several universities including Drexel University, Indiana University, Emory University, University of California at Berkeley, and Columbia College.

We are grateful for support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Education (ED), International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), Protocol Laboratories, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Faculty

Dr. Michael L. Nelson
Research topics: web science, web archiving, social media, digital libraries, repositories

Dr. Michele C. Weigle
Research topics: web science, digital preservation, social media, information visualization

Dr. Sampath Jayarathna
Research topics: eye tracking, data science, machine learning, multimodal sensing, cognitive computing, digital libraries
Neuro Information Retrieval and Data Science Lab

Dr. Jian Wu
Research topics: text mining, scholarly big data, digital libraries, search engines, natural language processing, applied machine learning, deep learning

Dr. Vikas Ashok
Research topics: human-computer interaction, accessible computing, natural language processing, web technologies

Dr. Faryaneh Poursardar
Research topics: digital libraries, social computing, web science, data science, machine learning, digital data preservation

Students

PhD students

Lawrence Obiuwevwi (Jayarathna)

Yasasi Abeysinghe (Jayarathna)

Kehinde Ajayi (Wu)

Jhon G. Botello (Weigle)

David Calano (Nelson)

Jimmy Ecker (Nelson)

Md Javedul Ferdous (ABD) (Ashok)

Lesley Frew (Weigle)

Hussam Hallak (ABD) (Nelson)

Kritika Garg (ABD) (Nelson)

Himarsha Jayanetti (ABD) (Weigle)

Brian Llinás (Nelson)

Rochana R. Obadage (Wu)

Travis Reid (ABD) (Weigle)

Lamia Salsabil (Wu)

Sunkara Mohan Krishna (Ashok)

Kumushini Thennakoon (Jayarathna)

Dominik Soós (Wu)

Xin Wei (Wu)

Tarannum Zaki (Weigle)

Nithiya Venkatraman (Ashok)

Yash Prakash (Ashok)

Akshay Kolgar Nayak (Ashok)

Pasindu Thenahandi (Jayarathna)

Chameli Dommanige (Wu)

MS students

BS students

Alumni

PhD Alumni

Dr. Bhanuka Mahanama (2025) - "Multi-Eyes: Multi-User Eye Tracking Using Commodity Hardware"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Old Dominion University

Dr. Muntabir Hasan Choudhury (2024) - "ETDSuite: A Toolkit To Mine Electronic Theses And Dissertations To Enrich Scholarly Big Data Using Natural Language Processing And Computer Vision"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: FDA

Dr. Yasith Jayawardana (2024) - "Streaminghub - A Realtime Biosignal Processing Framework for Lab Scale Experimentation"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Gavindya Jayawardena (2024) - "RAEMAP: Real-Time Advanced Eye Movements Analysis Pipeline"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: The University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Bathsheba Farrow (2024) - "A Microservices Approach to Electroencephalography Research in the Public Cloud"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Naval Surface Warfare Center

Dr. Corren McCoy (2022) - "A Relevance Model for Threat-Centric Ranking of Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: G2 Ops

Dr. Shawn M. Jones (2021) - "Improving Collection Understanding For Web Archives With Storytelling: Shining Light Into Dark and Stormy Archives"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Dr. Sawood Alam (2020) - "MementoMap: A Web Archive Profiling Framework for Efficient Memento Routing"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Internet Archive

Dr. Mohamed Aturban (2020) - "A Framework for Verifying the Fixity of Archived Web Resources"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Columbia College

Dr. Alexander Nwala (2020) - "Bootstrapping Web Archive Collections From Micro-Collections in Social Media"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Indiana University

Dr. Mat Kelly (2019) - "Aggregating Private and Public Web Archives Using the Mementity Framework"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Drexel University

Dr. Lulwah Alkwai (2019) - "Expanding the Usage of Web Archives by Recommending Archived Webpages Using Only the URI"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: University of Hail

Dr. Yasmin AlNoamany (2016) - "Using Web Archives to Enrich the Live Web Experience Through Storytelling"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Justin F. Brunelle (2016) - "Scripts in a Frame: A Two-Tiered Approach for Archiving Deferred Representations"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: MITRE

Dr. Hany SalahEldeen (2015) - "Detecting, Modeling, and Predicting User Temporal Intention in Social Media"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Microsoft

Dr. Chuck Cartledge (2014) - "A Framework for Web Object Self-Preservation"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Fulcrum IT Services

Dr. Ahmed AlSum (2014) - "Web Archive Services Framework for Tighter Integration Between the Past and Present Web"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: Stanford University

Dr. Martin Klein (2011) - "Using the Web Infrastructure for Real Time Recovery of Missing Web Pages"- wrap-up blog
Initial employment: LANL

Dr. Joan Smith (2008) - "Integrating Preservation Functions Into the Web Server"
Initial employment: Emory University

Dr. Frank McCown (2007) - "Lazy Preservation: Reconstructing Websites from the Web Infrastructure"
Initial employment: Harding University

MS Alumni

Caleb Bradford (2024)

Dominik Soós (2024) - "Improving LLM Discernibility in Scientific News"- wrap-up blog

Lesley Frew (2024) - "Surfacing Text Changes in Archived Webpages"- wrap-up blog

Emily Escamilla (2023) - "Assessing the Prevalence and Archival Rate of URIs to Git Hosting Platforms in Scholarly Publications"- wrap-up blog

Himarsha R. Jayanetti (2023) - "Supporting Account-based Queries for Archived Instagram Posts"- wrap-up blog

Sami Uddin (2022) - "TransParsCit: A Transformer-Based Citation Parser Trained on Large-Scale Synthesized Data"
Initial employment: Virginia Marine Resources Commission

Nauman Siddique (2021)

Abigail Mabe (2021)

Dhruv Patel (2021)

Puneeth Bikkasandra Puttaramegowda (2020)

John Berlin (2018) - "To Relive The Web: A Framework For The Transformation And Archival Replay Of Web Pages"- wrap-up blog

Grant Atkins (2018)

Maheedhar Gunnam (2018)

Erika Siregar (2017)

Hung Do (2017)

Greg Szalkowski (2016)

Shawn M. Jones (2015) - "Avoiding Spoilers On MediaWiki Fan Sites Using Memento"- wrap-up blog

Sawood Alam (2013) - "HTTP Mailbox - Asynchronous RESTful Communication"- wrap-up blog

Mat Kelly (2012) - "An Extensible Framework for Creating Personal Web Archives of Content Behind Authentication"- wrap-up blog

Kalpesh Padia (2012) - "Visualizing Digital Collections at Archive-It"- wrap-up blog

Carlton Northern (2011)

Matthias Prellwitz (2010)

Jeb Ware (2010)

Scott Ainsworth (2010)

Jeffery Shipman (2010)

Sudhir Koneru (2009)

Venkata Potta (2009)

Rabia Haq (2008) - "Using Timed-Release Cryptography to Mitigate Preservation Risk of Embargo Periods"

Olena Hunsicker (2008)

Venkata Sai Krishna Kamineni (2008)

Satish Lakkoju (2008)

Krishnan Ganesh Madras (2008)

Amine Benjelloun (2007)

Manoranjan Magudam (2007)

Ignacio Garcia del Campo (2006)

Aravind Elango (2005)

Giridhar Manepalli (2005)

Suchitra Manepalli (2005)

Daniel Swaney (2005)

Terry Harrison (2005) - "Opal: In Vivo Based Preservation Framework for Locating Lost Web Pages"

Sheffan Chan (2004)

Thomas Lutkenhouse (2004)

Research

• Faculty, students, and alumni at Google Scholar
• @WebSciDL retweets highlights and announcements from WS-DL members
• Software and data at GitHub
• Trip reports, paper summaries, announcements, releases, early results at Blogger
• Annual research summaries: 2024, 2023 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013

Courses

• CS 395 Research Methods in Data and Web Science
  Topics: writing proposals, reading & writing papers, giving presentations, Python, Web APIs, reproducibility, LaTeX, and GitHub.
• CS 418/518 Web Programming
  Topics: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), MVC (Model-View-Control), Search Engines, GitHub.  
• CS 431/531 Web Server Design
  Topics: HTTP, REST (Representational State Transfer), HATEOAS.
• CS 432/532 Web Science
  Topics: Python, GitHub, LaTeX, data visualization, information retrieval, social networks, collective intelligence, machine learning.
• CS 480/580 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
  Topics: problem representation, problem-solving methods, search, pattern recognition, natural language processing, vision processing, machine learning, and expert systems.
• CS 495/595 Intro to Data Mining
  Topics: data preprocessing, pattern mining, outlier analysis, and mining of text, data streams, time series, spatial, and graph data.
• CS 495/595 Web Security
  Topics: HTTP, Cross-Site Request Forgery, Same Origin Policy, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Fingerprinting, Denial-of-service, Phishing.
• CS 620 Intro to Data Science & Analytics
  Topics: Python, Pandas, NumPy, NoSQL, Data Wrangling, ML.
• CS 625 Data Visualization
  Topics: Tableau, R, Vega-Lite, Observable, Markdown, OpenRefine, data cleaning, visual perception, visualization design, exploratory data analysis, visual storytelling.
• CS 725/825 Information Visualization and Visual Analytics
  Topics: Vega-Lite, D3, Observable, visual analytics, interactive visualization, dashboard design, reading academic vis papers.
• CS 728/828 Deep Learningbr/>Topics: ully-connected neural networks, recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, regularization, generalization, loss function, backpropagation, attention, transformer, graph neural networks, and deep reinforcement learning
• CS 733/833 Natural Language Processing
  Topics: Language Models, Word2Vec, BERT, Deep Learning, Assistants.
• CS 795/895 Mining Scholarly Big Data
  Topics: Apache Spark, NLP, Data Mining, Recommenders.
• CS 734/834 Information Retrieval
  Topics: crawling, ranking, query processing, retrieval models, evaluation, clustering, machine learning.
• CS 795/895 Natural Language Understanding
  Topics: Fundamentals of neural networks and deep learning, natural language reference, sentiment analysis, and semantic parsing.
• CS 795/895 Web Archiving Forensics
  Topics: Memento, CDX, Twitter, Caching.
• CS 795/895 Intelligent User Interfaces
  Topics: HCI, Assistive Technologies, Speech Interfaces, Wearable Computing, Crowd-Powered Interfaces
• CS 795/895 Human-Computer Interaction
  Topics: cognitive and social phenomena surrounding human use of computers.
• CS 795/895 Foundation Models of Data Science
  Topics: Concept, history, instances of foundation models and their applications in healthcare, biomedicine, law, and education; technology and capabilities as applied to language, vision, robotics, reasoning, search, modeling, training, adaptation, prompt engineering, evaluation, systems, data, security and privacy, robustness to distribution shift, safety and alignment, and interpretability
• CS 891 Emerging Technologies
  Topics: Cloud, Edge, IoT, Blockchain, Security, Agile.

Previous semesters: S26, F25, S25, F24 S24, F23, S23, F22, S22, F21, S21, F20, S20, F19, S19, and F18

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