Shomir Wilson

Associate Professor
Director, The Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence

E310 Westgate Building
288 Burrowes Road
University Park, PA 16802

Email suw724@psu.edu
Pronouns he, him, his

Areas of Expertise

Natural Language Processing
Privacy
Computational Social Science
Fairness in Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Security

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Maryland, 2011
M.S., Computer Science, University of Maryland, 2008
B.S., Computer Science, Virginia Tech, 2005
B.S., Mathematics, Virginia Tech, 2005
.,. Philosophy, Virginia Tech, 2005

Websites

Dr. Shomir Wilson is an associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2011 and held postdoctoral positions in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics.

Dr. Wilson directs the Human Language Technologies Lab, with research spanning natural language processing (NLP), privacy, security, and computational social science. A recent focus of his lab's work is studying digital privacy practices and technology users' privacy behaviors using methods from NLP. This work explores organizations' data practices at a large scale, yielding knowledge about the state of consumer privacy, and also examines how and why people use technology to share personal information. Additionally, his lab has a broad portfolio of projects applying NLP to problems in a variety of sociotechnical systems.

Funding for Dr. Wilson's research has come from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Funding highlights include an NSF CAREER award to apply NLP to consumer-oriented legal documents and a $1.2M NSF SaTC grant to build large-scale resources for analyzing texts about online privacy practices. His lab has received publication awards from EMNLP, PETS, DocEng, and TrustNLP. His public outreach has included written testimony for a U.S. Senate hearing on AI-driven scams, serving for several years as a Grand Awards Judge for the International Science and Engineering Fair, and media appearances in NBC News, Yahoo News, Inside Higher Ed, and Scripps Media.

Dr. Wilson has performed research or teaching activities at several universities abroad, including the Future University of Egypt (a series of guest lectures on AI ethics, 2018), the University of Edinburgh (NSF International Research Fellow, 2013-2014), the National University of Singapore (NSF EAPSI Singapore Fellow, 2010), and Macquarie University (NSF EAPSI Australia Fellow, 2009).

You can read more about his work and interests on his website.

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Shomir Wilson

Areas of Expertise

Education

Websites

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