2024-11-08: From Budapest to Norfolk

Born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, soccer was everything to me growing up. I played the sport for most of my life, and eventually to California to finish high school, hoping to take my soccer skills to the next level. But life threw me a curveball—or rather, a football. One day, the head coach of the football team at St. Mary's High School asked if I wanted to kick for the team. I thought to myself, "Why not?" So, I traded in my soccer cleats (kind of) and became the kicker for the football team. 

Joining the football team was a completely different experience. I loved weightlifting already, but now I was part of a much larger team, with each person playing a unique role. I learned how critical every position was, and how everyone had to own their specific tasks to make the team succeed. This understanding of teamwork, where each individual has an essential role, shaped the way I approach challenges even today in my research. 

After high school, I went on to play football at City College of San Francisco and earned my AS in Computer Science. Then, I was recruited by ODU, where I continued playing football and completed my BS in Computer Science in May 2023. One of my favorite memories on the field was the opening kickoff against Virginia Tech; we won on our home turf, and the entire stadium rushed the field in celebration. 

While I was an undergrad, I started working with Dr. Jian Wu, and in 2022, I co-authored my first research paper at DocEng'22. Later, I followed it up with a second publication at MobiHoc'23. Working with Dr. Wu and being part of the LAMP-SYS (Lab for Applied Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Systems) within WSDL (Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group) since January 2022 was a huge part of my academic journey. I had the opportunity to present our work at international conferences as well as local poster presentations for CCI Symposium in the Spring of 2023. 

During my master's, I dove into research on enhancing the discernibility of LLMs to differentiate between human-written and LLM-generated science news. Writing my thesis on this topic was a challenging yet rewarding experience, and I shared my findings in a blog post. Now, after defending my thesis, I'm excited to have joined the PhD program, where I'm focusing on utilizing LLMs to create content that engages readers and to evaluate science news.

I'm passionate about applying machine learning and deep learning techniques to real-world problems, especially in natural language processing. Whether I'm in a research lab or on the field, that same lesson from football holds true: every role matters, and when we come together, we can achieve incredible things. 

~Dominik Soós