News

2026

• _{Paper presentation "Learning Subject Tags from Incomplete Labels: A Recall-Oriented VLM Pipeline for Historical Photographs" at ACM/IEEE JCDL 2026, Dallas, Texas, USA, October 13–16, 2026 (DOI)}
• _{Our paper "METT: High-Frequency Return Forecasting from Event Streams" has been accepted and selected for an oral presentation at the 7th ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF 2026), Milan, Italy, November 14–17, 2026}
• _{Our paper “Evaluation of Open-Source LLMs for Automated Subject Metadata Generation in Scholarly Workflows” was published in Journal of Library Metadata, October 1, 2026}
• _{Our paper "GlanceWAM: Sparse Test-Time Imagination for World-Action Models" has been accepted as a poster presentation at the RoBoWoMo Workshop at IROS 2026, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, September 27, 2026}
• _{Awarded: IMLS National Leadership Grants - Libraries (LG-259770-OLS-26) Sovereign Library Intelligence (SLI): An Agentic AI Framework for Trustworthy Library Collections Stewardship and Access, August, 2026 (PI)}
• _{Our paper "Learning Subject Tags from Incomplete Labels: A Recall-Oriented VLM Pipeline for Historical Photographs" was accepted by JCDL 2026 (DOI)}
• _{Our paper “Evaluation of Open-Source LLMs for Automated Subject Metadata Generation in Scholarly Workflows” was accepted by Journal of Library Metadata, 2026}
• _{Presentation "Designing GenAI Curriculum for Library AI Practitioners" at Teaching and Learning with AI Conference, Orlando, FL, June 11-13, 2026}
• _{Presentation "Prompt Library at Virginia Tech" at SCONUL AI Webinar - Prompt libraries, Virtual, May 15, 2026}
• _{Earned CyberAmbassador Certificate (Communication, Teamwork, Leadership), CyberAmbassadors Program (NSF Award #1730137), April 20, 2026}
• _{Presentation at ISBI 2026, London, UK, April 8–11, 2026}
• _{I am serving on the Program Committee for CIKM 2026, Rome, Italy, November 7-11, 2026}
• _{I am pleased to serve as a Proceedings Chair and Senior Program Committee member for ACM/IEEE JCDL 2026, Dallas, Texas, USA, October 13–16, 2026}
• _{Our paper “SemiETPicker: Fast and Label-Efficient Particle Picking for CryoET Tomography Using Semi-Supervised Learning” has been accepted at ISBI 2026 as an oral presentation, London, UK, April 8–11, 2026}
• _{Presented at the workshop "Unlocking the Power of AI in Research," Virginia Tech, February 27, 2026}

2025

• _{Presentation "Learning Prompt Engineering Through Curated Example" at eLearning in Libraries Symposium 2025, Virtual, November 25-26, 2025}
• _{Google Gemini Certified Educator, October, 2025}
• _{Intro to Prompt Engineering online course, Virginia Tech Continuing & Professional Education, September 1 - October 12, 2025}
• _{Presentation "AI fluency, Prompt Engineering, and Prompt Science" at Business Information Technology departmental retreat, August 21, 2025}
• _{Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 Certified Data Science Professional, August 20, 2025}
• _{Oracle AI Vector Search Certified Professional, July 31, 2025}
• _{Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 Certified Generative AI Professional, July 23, 2025}
• _{Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 Certified AI Foundations Associate, July 17, 2025}
• _{Article published: "AI skills for tomorrow's university librarians" in Times Higher Education Campus, June 10, 2025}
• _{Presentation "Developing Generative AI Competencies for Librarians" at Generative AI in Libraries (GAIL) Virtual Conference, June 9-12, 2025}
• _{Intro to Prompt Engineering online course, Virginia Tech Continuing & Professional Education, June 2 - July 14, 2025}
• _{Presentation at CNI Spring 2025 Membership Meeting, Milwaukee, WI, April 7-8, 2025}

2024

• _{Workshop at ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2024), Hong Kong, China, December 16-20, 2024}
• _{Presentation at IEEE BigData 2024, Washington, DC, December 15-18, 2024}
• _{Congratulations to Pradyumna Upendra Dasu for successfully defending his MS thesis, "Topic Modeling for Heterogeneous Digital Libraries: Tailored Approaches Using Large Language Models," at Virginia Tech on December 13, 2024}
• _{Presentation at 27th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2024), Livingstone, Zambia, November 4-6, 2024}
• _{Presentation at Access 2024, Montréal, Québec, October 21-23, 2024}
• _{Presentation at 24 Hours of Global IT event, August 28, 2024}
• _{Awarded: IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (RE-256655-OLS-24) LIBRAI: Liberating Libraries through Generative Artificial Intelligence Incubator Program, August, 2024 (PI)}
• _{Panelist at 2024 ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition, San Diego, CA, June 27-July 2, 2024}
• _{Presentation at Digital Universities US 2024, May 6-8, 2024}
• _{Presentation at CNI Spring 2024 Membership Meeting, March 25-26, 2024}
• _{Honored to be invited to the 2024 VALLA Cohort, Harrisonburg, VA, March 11-13, 2024}

2023

• _{Congratulations to Chongyu He for successfully defending his MS thesis, "Deep Learning Approach for Cell Nuclear Pore Detection and Quantification over High Resolution 3D Data," at Virginia Tech on December 7, 2023}
• _{Workshop at Fantastic Futures Annual International Conference, Vancouver, Canada, November 15-17, 2023}
• _{Student project demostration at Virginia Tech Science Festival 2023, November 11, 2023}
• _{Tutorial at DCMI Annual Conference, Daegu, South Korea, November 6-9, 2023}
• _{Awarded: IMLS National Leadership Grants (LG-254883-OLS-23) Curating Very Large Biomedical Image Datasets For Librarian-In-The-Loop Deep Learning, September, 2023 (Co-PI)}
• _{Awarded: IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (RE-254915-OLS-23) Joint Professional Development Institute To Cultivate Collaborative Library Scholars, September, 2023 (Co-PI)}
• _{Virginia Tech Libraries Collaborative Research Grant Awardee: Leveraging Large Language Models to Understand the Financial Behavior of Women and Minority Groups, August, 2023}
• _{Virginia Tech Libraries Collaborative Research Grant Awardee: Behind Density Lines: Machine Learning and Citizen Scientists in Quantifying Scanning Electron Microscopy Images, August, 2023}
• _{Text and Data Mining Community of Practice - ChatGPT and its Best Practices, August 10, 2023}
• _{Presentation at LD4 Conference on Linked Data, July 10-14, 2023}
• _{Workshop at on Code4Lib Annual Conference, Princeton, New Jersey, March 14-17 2023}
• _{AWS Academy Educator, January, 2023}
• _{AWS Academy Educator, January, 2023}
• _{AWS Learning: Serverless, January, 2023}

2022

• _{AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty, December, 2022}
• _{TensorFlow Developer Certificate, October, 2022}
• _{AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty, October, 2022}
• _{Paper presentation at JCDL 2022, Germany and Online, June 20–24, 2022}
• _{Paper presentation at Open Repositories 2022, Denver, June 6-9, 2022}

2021

• _{Professional Scrum Master™ II (PSM II). November, 2021}
• _{Attended AWS re:Invent 2021, NOV. 29 – DEC. 3, 2021}
• _{Attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2021, OCT. 11 - 15, 2021}
• _{JCDL Tutorial: Introduction to Digital Libraries. 2021, September 27, 2021}
• _{AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, September, 2021}
• _{AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, August, 2021}
• _{Presentation at Web Archiving Conference (WAC) 2021, June 15, 2021}
• _{Presentation at Open Repositories 2021, June 10, 2021}
• _{Attended Google I/O 2021, MAY. 18-20, 2021}
• _{Attended Code4Lib 2021, MAR. 22 - 26, 2021}
• _{Attended CNI Spring 2021 meeting, MAR. 15, 2021}

2020

• _{Presentation at Digital Preservation 2020, Nov 12, 2020}
• _{Attended AWS re:Invent 2020, NOV. 28 – DEC. 2, 2020}
• _{Attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020, OCT. 10 - 14, 2020}
• _{Building a full-stack Serverless Web application with React and AWS, March, 2020}
• _{Attended Code4lib 2020, March 8-11, 2020, Pittsburgh, PA}
• _{Code4Lib Journal Issue 47 - Scaling IIIF Image Tiling in the Cloud, Feb, 2020}
• _{Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I), Feb, 2020}
• _{Attended IT Council Symposium 2020, Jan 8, 2020, Blacksburg, VA}

2019

• _{Attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon'19, Nov 18-21, 2019, San Diego, CA}
• _{AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty, Aug, 2019}
• _{Docker Certified Associate, July, 2019}
• _{MIT xPro: Data Science and Big Data Analytics Making Data-Driven Decisions, July, 2019}
• _{Paper presentation at Open Repositories 2019, Hamburg}
• _{Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), June, 2019}
• _{Attended AWS Public Sector Summit, Jun 11-12, 2019, DC}
• _{Attended Google Cloud Next '19, April 9-11, 2019, San Francisco, CA}
• _{Google Cloud Certified - Professional Data Engineer, March, 2019}
• _{Fedora 5.0.2 Release Manager, Feb, 2019}
• _{Attended Fedora 6 design meeting, Feb 26-28, 2019, Virginia Beach, VA}

2018

• _{Attended KubeCon + CloudNativeCon'18, Dec 10-13, 2018, Seattle, WA}
• _{AWS Certification Subject Matter Expert - Machine Learning, Oct, 2018}
• _{AWS Certified Security - Specialty, Oct, 2018}
• _{Attended AWS, Oct 23-25, 2018, Santa Monica, CA}
• _{Paper presentation at ETD 2018, Sep 26-28, Taipei, Taiwan}
• _{Google Cloud Certified - Professional cloud architect, Aug, 2018}
• _{Paper presentation at Open Repositories 2018, Bozeman, Montana}
• _{Google Cloud Certified - Associate cloud engineer, June, 2018}
• _{Attended Deep Learning on AWS, May 25, 2018, Herndon, VA}
• _{Attended ODSC East 2018, May 1-4, Boston, MA}
• _{Attended O'Reilly Software Architecture 2018, Feb 26–28, New York, NY}
• _{Attended Code4lib 2018, Feb 13-16, DC}
• _{PAWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Jan, 2018}
• _{Attended Building a Serverless Data Lake on AWS, Jan 12, 2018, Herndon, VA}

2017

• _{AWS Certified Big Data - Specialty, Nov, 2017}
• _{Attended AWS re:Invent 2017, Nov 27 - Dec 1, Las Vegas, NV}
• _{Attended Samvera Connect 2017, Nov 6-9, Evanston, IL}
• _{AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional, Oct, 2017}
• _{Attended Security Operations on AWS, Oct 17, 2017, Herndon, VA}
• _{AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate, Sep, 2017}
• _{Attended Migrating to AWS, Sep 17, 2017, Herndon, VA}
• _{AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, Aug, 2017}
• _{AWS Certified Developer - Associate, Jun, 2017}
• _{AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate, Jun, 2017}
• _{Attended Advanced Architecting on AWS, May 23, 2017, Herndon, VA}

2016

• _{Attended Developing on AWS, Dec 13, 2016, Herndon, VA}
• _{Attended Big Data on AWS, Dec 06, 2016, Herndon, VA}
• _{Attended Hydra Connect 2016, Oct 3-6, Boston, MA}
• _{Attended JCDL 2016, June 19-23, Newark, NJ}

2015

• _{Attended JCDL 2015, June 21-25, Knoxville, TN}

2014

• _{Attended International Conference on Digital Libraries (DL 2014), Sep. 2014, London, UK}

2012

• _{Attended JCDL 2012, June 10-14, Washington D.C.}