About Me
Who I Am
I (he/him) am an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, where I lead the Human Language Technologies Lab. I am also an affiliate of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, an affiliate of the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence, and a member of the Social Data Analytics graduate faculty.
My research spans natural language processing, privacy, online social media, and computational social science. You can read more about my research interests.
From 2016 until 2018 I was an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at the University of Cincinnati. Prior to that I was a postdoc and a lecturer in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and an NSF International Research Fellow in the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2011.
Contacting Me
You can reach me at shomir _at_ psu.edu. If you are on Penn State's University Park campus, you can stop by my office at E310 in the Westgate Building.
Students taking my classes may benefit from browsing my Guide for Interacting With Faculty before contacting me.
Students interested in joining my lab: I sometimes have openings for PhD students, MS students, and undergraduates to work on projects related to natural language processing or privacy. If you're interested in working with me, first consult my Guide for Joining My Lab and then email me with "read your recruiting note" as the subject line. Include a CV and an explanation of your specific interests in my research.
Curriculum Vitae
Latest News
I also sometimes post news and thoughts to Twitter.
2021-09-16: I am chairing the selection committee for IST's Westin Scholars Award. I encourage undergraduates in the College of IST to apply.
2021-08-15: This Digital Trends article quotes me about the risk of privacy becoming a luxury feature, and the durability of our search engine preferences.
2021-07-28: Here's a press release about the $1.2M NSF award I'm leading to build corpora, language models, and proof-of-concept tools that make use of large quantities of privacy-related text on the web. Here's the project website.
2021-06-20: I added a Guide to Professorspeak to Advice for Students.
2021-05-25: Here's a press release about our interdisciplinary collaboration to study police language to find patterns that may lead to tragic outcomes when police encounter male minority youth.
2021-05-18: I'm hiring an Assistant Research Professor to join my lab.
2021-02-14: I added Thoughts on Competition in Academia to Advice for Students.
For older news, check the archive.