Current Research Projects

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

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

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

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