
Current Research Projects
Research in IST cuts across traditional boundaries to drive interdisciplinary discovery and innovation. Our research is sponsored by a variety of national and international agencies, and we collaborate with diverse groups of scholars within and beyond Penn State. Explore our funded projects to see how IST's transformative research is addressing the world's most complex problems at the intersection of information, technology, and society.
2024-2025 DoD Cyber Scholarship Program (CYSP)
Cybersecurity is considered so important to our national defense that a formal DoD Scholarship program was established by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2001 (Public Law 106- 398). The purpose is to promote the education, recruitment, and retention of rising junior and senior...
Researchers
- Michael Hills
- Nicklaus Giacobe
Sponsoring Agency
- Washington Headquarters Services (DOD)
A Knowledge Graph Warehouse for Nonfatal Firearm Injuries
This project aims to establish a robust and sustainable data infrastructure to integrate neighborhood-level data to assist and inform various local stakeholders. Drawing on local records, census data and other neighborhood-level data the project will construct a unified database to capture...
Researcher
- Fenglong Ma
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
AI-Powered Autonomy-Aware Neighborhood Mobility Zones: Equitable Solutions and Business Models for Revamping Transportation
This project aims to revolutionize public transportation in mid-sized cities, such as Chattanooga, TN, by creating a seamlessly integrated, multi-modal transportation network that is both attractive to passengers and financially viable. To bridge the gap between potential and reality, our...
Researcher
- Aron Laszka
Sponsoring Agency
- U.S. Department of Energy
Benchmark: Whether LLM agents can evaluate, replicate, and independently conduct research processes
Researcher
- Sarah Rajtmajer
Sponsoring Agency
- Open Philanthropy Project
BPC-DP: Cultivating Academic Inclusion and Career Engagement to Increase the Persistence of Minoritized Students in Computing
Researchers
- Lynette Yarger
- Roderick Lee
- Chris Gamrat
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
CAREER: Large-Scale Exploration and Interpretation of Consumer-Oriented Legal Documents
This project will examine the full spectrum of consumer-oriented legal documents (COLDs), with the goal of bridging the understanding gap between consumers and these documents. To function in our information society, people must read and accept financial agreements, health care agreements, rental...
Researcher
- Shomir Wilson
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
CAREER: Automated Multimodal Learning for Healthcare
Multimodal learning is one of the central tasks of artificial intelligence (AI), which aims to effectively fuse and model multimodal data to gain a better understanding of the world around us. Many multimodal fusion strategies have been proposed, ranging from manually designed policies to...
Researcher
- Fenglong Ma
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
CAREER: Enabling Driver Situation Awareness across Physical and Cyber Spaces via Usable and Trustworthy V2X Communication
Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is one of the key pillars upon which connected and automated vehicles rest. In V2X, vehicles communicate directly with other road users and infrastructure, allowing perception of road conditions and driving environment beyond their own sensors, in turn...
Researcher
- Aiping Xiong
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
CAREER: Enhancing Practical Defense Mechanisms against Memory Errors and Attacks
Given the constant threat of software vulnerabilities and malicious attacks, the computer security community is always working on improving defense mechanisms for real-world use. At the same time, they also need to make sure these defenses can stand up to determined attackers who are ready to...
Researcher
- Hong Hu
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
CAREER: Rethinking Toolchain Design for Rust
As a young programing language, Rust features its safety and performance. The key innovation of Rust is to rule out memory bugs and concurrency bugs through strict safety checks during compilation, while keeping the runtime performance of its compiled programs as good as C programs. Rust's...
Researcher
- Hong Hu
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
CAREER: Robust Fairness in Matching Markets
The broad objective of this proposal is to develop a theoretically grounded approach for robust fairness in practical and large-scale allocation markets through the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), economics, and computation. The proposed research aims at making advances in the...
Researcher
- Hadi Hosseini
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Collaboration Agreement: Predicting Bacteremia in Duke Patients
Researcher
- Justin Silverman
Sponsoring Agency
- Duke University
Collaborative Research: CCRI: New: An Open Data Infrastructure for Bodily Expressed Emotion Understanding
Researcher
- James Wang
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Collaborative Research: FW-HTF-RL: Understanding the Ethics, Development, Design, and Integration of Artificial Intelligence Teammates in Future Mental Health Work
Researcher
- Saeed Abdullah
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Collaborative Research: IIS: HCC: Small: The New Gatekeepers: Content Moderation and Resilience to Informational Threats in Local
This project maps how volunteer moderators are functioning as gatekeepers of local civic information and first responders to information threats within online local community groups. This is a crucial first step toward building effective tools (social, technological, and policy) that can support...
Researcher
- Kelley Cotter
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Collaborative Research: RI: III: SHF: Small: Multi-Stakeholder Decision Making: Qualitative Preference Languages, Interactive Reasoning, and Explanation
The ability to express and reason about preferences over a set of alternatives is central to rational decision-making in a broad range of applications, such as product design, public policy, health care, information security, and privacy, among others. Because of the unavailability of...
Researcher
- Vasant Honavar
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Collaborative Research: RI: Medium: Transparent Fair Division of Indivisible Items
Fair division deals with the distribution of welfare among a population of agents with the goal of achieving fairness. We propose a new framework based on epistemic fairness through information withholding. The broad goal of this proposal is to provide axiomatic and algorithmic solutions for fair...
Researcher
- Hadi Hosseini
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Cyber-threat Detections and Diagnosis in Multistage Manufacturing Systems through Cyber and Physical Data Analytics
In modern multistage manufacturing systems, with increased software-defined automation and control as well as monitoring of manufacturing assets across networks, exposure to cyber-attacks also grows. The cyber-threats may compromise the integrity of manufacturing assets (manufacturing systems and...
Researcher
- Peng Liu
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Collaborative research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: PRIVASEER: A large-scale, longitudinal resource to advance technical and legal understanding of textual information about privacy
A core component of consumer privacy protection is transparency. The wealth of available text about companies’ and institutions’ privacy practices contrasts markedly with our inability to understand digital privacy at scale. Organizations post privacy policies on the web, along with terms of...
Researcher
- Shomir Wilson
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Collaborative Research: SaTC: EDU: A Curriculum for Watermarking AI-Generated Content: Theory, Algorithms, and Testing
Despite its societal benefits, generative AI also raises many societal and legal concerns. For instance, it may be abused to generate harmful content and boost disinformation campaigns. Watermark-based detection of AI-generated content is a key technology to address these societal and legal...
Researcher
- Jinyuan Jia
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Computer-based Stroke Analysis
Researchers
- Sharon Huang
- James Wang
Sponsoring Agency
- Houston Methodist Hospital
DeepFusion Accelerator for Fusion Energy Sciences in Disruption Mitigations
Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically, Deep Learning (DL) promises a revolution in how physics and engineering can be seamlessly bridged for authentic predictive control and predictive design of engineering systems like fusion power reactors. This project aims to develop and apply...
Researcher
- Romit Maulik
Sponsoring Agency
- U.S. Department of Energy
Designing Human-Technology Interaction for Next-Generation Digital Facility Management
Researchers
- Syed Billah
- Vasant Honavar
Sponsoring Agency
- University of Virginia
DISCOVER: Digital Twin for Security and Code Verification
Researcher
- Dinghao Wu
Sponsoring Agency
- U.S. Department of Energy
DMS/NIGMS 1: Addressing Measurement Limitations for Sequence Count Data
Sequence count data (e.g., 16S rRNA sequencing or single-cell RNA-seq) are ubiquitous in modern biomedical research. Yet even in the absence of measurement noise and limitations of experimental design, these data convey limited information about the underlying biological system being measured....
Researcher
- Justin Silverman
Sponsoring Agency
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences
EAGER: SaTC AI-Cybersecurity: SAGA: A Framework for Developing Attributable Cybersecurity Case Studies
We propose a flexible framework, named as SAGA, where scholars can easily create cybersecurity case studies (similar to business case studies) that have AI components. Further, by adopting the notion of “citation” in academic world and implementing it using public platforms (e.g., arXiv, Github,...
Researcher
- Dongwon Lee
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Equipping Librarians to Navigate Privacy Issues Involving Preteens and Technology
In this Early Career Research Development project, Dr. Priya Kumar of Pennsylvania State University will develop, test, and disseminate a toolkit that equips librarians to navigate privacy issues related to preteen engagement with technology. The Maryland State Library Agency, the Wisconsin...
Researcher
- Priya Kumar
Sponsoring Agency
- Institute of Museum and Library Services
Evaluating and Improving Trustworthiness in Large Language Models
Researchers
- Jinghui Chen
- Lu Lin
Sponsoring Agency
- U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Financial Activity Data as an Objective Behavioral Marker in Bipolar Disorder: A Feasibility and Acceptance Study
However, there remains a knowledge gap regarding how idiosyncratic, context-driven, and illness-specific factors impact financial decision-making in BD. Furthermore, the lack of granular, in-situ assessment methods is a key challenge against developing just-in-time and personalized interventions...
Researchers
- Saeed Abdullah
- Jeffrey Brozena
Sponsoring Agency
- National Institute of Mental Health
FW-HTF-RL: Collaborative Research: Up-skilling and Re-skilling Marginalized Rural and Urban Digital Workers: AI-worker collaboration to access creative work
Researcher
- Kelley Cotter
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Generating and Validating Captions for Scientific Figures Based on Scientific Claims
Researcher
- Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang
Sponsoring Agency
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
III: Small: Predictive Modeling from High-Dimensional, Sparsely and Irregularly Sampled Longitudinal Data
Longitudinal data resulting from repeated observations from a set of individuals over time are commonplace in many applications, including health sciences, learning sciences, social sciences, life sciences, and economics. Such data present unprecedented opportunities to uncover the relationship...
Researcher
- Vasant Honavar
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
III: Small: Towards Efficient Adaptive Federated Learning: Algorithms, Theories, and Applications
In federated learning, machine learning models are trained using the data of individual users without sharing the data outside of the original secure system. The paradigm is popular, in part because of the promise it holds for protecting privacy of data while still using data from multiple...
Researchers
- Jinghui Chen
- Fenglong Ma
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Inertial neural surrogates for stable dynamical prediction
Researcher
- Romit Maulik
Sponsoring Agency
- U.S. Department of Energy
Machine learning closures for adaptive data and model fusion
Researcher
- Romit Maulik
Sponsoring Agency
- Army Research Office
Middleware for Interactive XAI with Tree-based AI Performance Evaluation
Kitware, in partnership with Penn State University, is proud to propose this Phase I STTR effort to create XAI middleware that can support the interactive explanation and visualization of AI decision-making systems. Current (X)AI algorithms are often application-specific, limiting their...
Researcher
- Jonathan Dodge
Sponsoring Agency
- U.S. Department of the Army
NSF Student Travel Grant for 2024 ISOC Symposium on Vehicle Security and Privacy (VehicleSec)
The Internet Society Symposium on Vehicle Security and Privacy (ISOC VehicleSec) is an emerging venue for research around new theories, technologies, and systems that address the security and privacy issues that arise as vehicles become increasingly autonomous and connected. This award will...
Researcher
- Aiping Xiong
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
NSF Student Travel Grant for 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (ACM GROUP)
This award provides funding to support about 10 United States-based students to attend a doctoral consortium (DC) at the ACM 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (Group 2025), to be held in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The Group 2025 DC focuses on participating students'...
Researcher
- Yubo Kou
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Penn State CyberCorps Scholarship for Service Program
Through the Federal Cyber Corps Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, Penn State provides scholarships to outstanding students studying in the field of Cybersecurity (broadly defined). Each scholarship recipient will complete either a Bachelor, Master, or Ph.D. degree in diverse...
Researchers
- Dongwon Lee
- Peter Forster
- Anna Squicciarini
- Nicklaus Giacobe
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
ReDDDot Phase 1: Planning Grant: Responsible Prioritization of Housing & Behavioral Health Services to Individuals and Families Experiencing Homelessness
Researcher
- Amulya Yadav
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
REU: CAREER: Advanced Trace-oriented Binary Code Analysis
Binary code analysis is very attractive from a security viewpoint. First, in many tasks such as malware analysis, software plagiarism detection, and vulnerability exploration, the source code of the program under examination is often absent, and the analysis has to be done on binary code...
Researcher
- Dinghao Wu
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
RI: Small: Secure, Robust, and End-User Driven Prediction Aware Counterfactual Explanations
Researchers
- Amulya Yadav
- Lisa Lenze
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
SaTC: CORE: Small: Automatic Identification of Privilege-guard Variables for Data-only Attacks and Defenses
As cyber attackers are always exploring novel, low-cost hacking vectors to bypass current defenses, security researchers should examine the remaining threats comprehensively in order to develop effective defenses in advance. Within program memory, attackers are shifting their attentions from...
Researcher
- Hong Hu
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
SaTC: CORE: Small: Collaborative: Understanding and Detecting Memory Bugs in Rust
Rust is a young programming language designed for systems software development. Its main design goal is to achieve runtime performance as good as C while offering better memory and thread safety using a linear type system and strict compile-time checking. Rust has become increasingly popular...
Researcher
- Hong Hu
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
SaTC: CORE: Small: Community-Based Rehabilitation to Enhance Content Moderation
Researcher
- Yubo Kou
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
SaTC: CORE: Small: Investigating and Mitigating Harmful Design in User-Generated Virtual World through Design Moderation
User-generated virtual worlds are three-dimensional spaces that offer an immersive experience and are designed and populated by tens of millions of users, including a significant number of children. Many children spend considerable time in these online spaces to create, socialize, learn, and...
Researchers
- Yubo Kou
- Xinning Gui
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
SaTC: Core: Small: Understanding and Mitigating the Security Risks of AutoML
Automated machine learning (AutoML) is emerging as a new ML paradigm that automates the pipeline from raw data to deployable ML models and enables ordinary users to readily develop, deploy, and use ML techniques. Yet, in contrast to its surging popularity, the security implications of AutoML are...
Researchers
- Fenglong Ma
- Xinning Gui
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
SCC-IRG Track 1: Mobility for all - Harnessing Emerging Transit Solutions for Underserved Communities
Researcher
- Aron Laszka
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
SCH: AI-Enhanced Multimodal Sensor-on-a-chip for Alzheimer's Disease Detection
We propose a new research paradigm aimed at addressing scientific questions in both biosensing and machine learning for the early prediction of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and at solving a grand challenge in the identification of minimally-invasive AD biomarkers in tear, saliva, and blood. Our goal...
Researchers
- Fenglong Ma
- Sharon Huang
Sponsoring Agency
- National Institute on Aging
Toward Privacy Equity through Contextual Understanding of Self-Disclosure
The goal of this project is to address concerns about the privacy risks to personal information sharing in social media. Low socioeconomic and underrepresented populations report feeling especially concerned about their digital privacy in social media. The project team is studying how...
Researchers
- Sarah Rajtmajer
- Shomir Wilson
Sponsoring Agency
- National Science Foundation
Toward Unbiased AI Systems with Human-in-the-loop Multi-Agent Collaboration
Researcher
- Qingyun Wu
Sponsoring Agency
- Microsoft Corporation
Voice Assistant to Provide Cognitive Stimulation Therapy at Scale
Cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) is one of the most effective interventions for maintaining cognitive functioning and wellbeing of persons living with dementia (PLwDs). CST is currently recommended by the United Kingdom government for the management and support of PLwDs. Alzheimer's Disease...
Researcher
- Saeed Abdullah
Sponsoring Agency
- National Institute on Aging