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 a Faculty Affiliate of Penn State's Institute for Computational and Data Sciences 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.
2021-03-11: Two of our papers have been recently accepted: "PrivaSeer: A Privacy Policy Search Engine" by ICWE and "Digital Inequality Through the Lens of Self-Disclosure" by PoPETS.
2021-02-14: I added Thoughts on Competition in Academia to Advice for Students.
2021-01-15: Here's a press release about Opt-Out Easy, a web browser extension we created to help internet users protect their privacy. This was the product of a collaboration with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan.
2020-12-03: I added Thoughts on the Advice to Advice for Students. It explains why I created Advice for Students and the history of that part of my website.
2020-10-28: This Penn State News article quotes me about attending Virtual Grace Hopper last month.
For older news, check the archive.