Who I Am

I (he/him) am an associate professor in the Department of Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics, part of the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. I also serve as the program coordinator for our B.S. in Information Technology Ethics and Compliance, and I lead the Human Language Technologies Lab, with research spanning natural language processing, privacy, security, and computational social science.

Contacting Me

You can reach me at shomir _at_ psu.edu, but if you are a student, see the instructions below.

• If you're taking one of my classes, you might want to check out my Guide for Interacting With Faculty.
• If you're seeking help with the Information Technology Ethics and Compliance major, speak with your academic advisor and follow their instructions before contacting me. Advising has access to information and options that are specific to your needs.
• If you're interested in working with me on research, consult my Guide for Joining My Lab for how to contact me and what information to include.

My office is E310 Westgate Building.

Curriculum Vitae

Here it is.

Latest News

I also sometimes post news and thoughts to Bluesky and LinkedIn.

2026-01-17: I added a periodic table of faculty job titles to my advice pages.

2025-12-17: This afternoon I was honored to receive the College of IST's Community and Service Award, recognizing "[my] commitments and leadership to foster a sense of community within the college".

2025-12-13: I'm pleased to share that my paper "Rethinking How We Discuss the Guidance of Student Researchers in Computing" has received a Best Paper Award from SIGCSE 2026. Here's a preprint.

2025-10-30: Thanks to Penn State's Center for Social Data Analytics for hosting my invited talk "Natural Language Processing for Privacy Empowerment and Fairness".

2025-10-28: Thanks to Lycoming College's Lycoming Scholars program for hosting my invited talk "Case Studies of Sociodemographic Biases by Artificial Intelligence Models".

2025-10-17: Thanks to West Virginia University's CSEE Department for hosting my invited talk "Natural Language Processing for Privacy Empowerment and Fairness".

2025-09-30: The report from the January 2025 Dagstuhl seminar that I led, titled "Grand Challenges for Research on Privacy Documents", has been published.

2025-09-25: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published my op-ed "American strength in AI depends on international students".

2025-09-17: I participated in the Computing Research Association's Congressional Visit Day. Together with other faculty from Pennsylvania universities, I visited the offices of our US representatives and senators in Washington, DC to make the case for funding the National Science Foundation to the greatest extent possible.

2025-09-16: I've been selected to participate in Penn State's Distinguished Honors Faculty Program. I'll give a series of dinner talks about being a researcher abroad, based on my experiences in Australia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.

2025-09-15: Thanks to Marcos Zampieri for hosting me for an invited talk as part of the LLMs and Applications Seminar at George Mason University.

2025-08-21: I'm featured in an article and a video in the Summer 2025 edition of iConnect, my college's promotional magazine. Thanks to our Office of Marketing and Communications for their work.

2025-07-25: This news story by VTV 1 contains a video clip of me speaking about the White House's AI Action Plan. I appear toward the end of the video with a voiceover translation.

2025-07-21: I wrote an op-ed for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star titled "Students are unsung heroes of university research, and federal research funding cuts hurt them most".

For older news, check the archive.