About Me
Who I Am
I (he/him) am an Associate Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, where I lead the Human Language Technologies Lab. My research spans natural language processing, privacy, security, and computational social science.
Prior to becoming faculty, I held postdoctoral positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Edinburgh. 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 for how to contact me and what information to include.
Curriculum Vitae
Latest News
I also sometimes post news and thoughts to Bluesky and LinkedIn.
2024-12-06: I gave the keynote talk at Penn State's 17th Annual Postdoctoral Research Symposium. Here's a recording of my talk.
2024-11-05: I'm pleased to share that our CSCW paper "Race and Privacy in Broadcast Police Communications" (preprint) has received a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Recognition from the conference.
2024-09-26: I gave a keynote talk at SEPLN.
2024-08-15: I gave the keynote talk at the Private NLP workshop at ACL.
2024-08-15: I'm pleased to share that my TeachingNLP 2024 paper "Documenting the Unwritten Curriculum of Student Research" received the workshop's Best Teaching Material award. This is my first publication about my advice pages.
2024-06-06: I'm honored to be selected for the Computing Research Association's Future Leaders Program. Here's a Penn State News article about it.
2024-05-28: I've been selected to participate in the Penn State Emerging Academic Leaders (PSEAL) program.
2024-05-12: I added Tenure Worth Wanting, containing advice for pretenure faculty, to my advice pages.
2024-05-03: I'm pleased to share that I've received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor, effective July 1. I owe many thanks to colleagues, collaborators, and students.
2024-04-03: This past November I was invited to provide written testimony for the US Senate's Special Committee on Aging. I shared my observations as a researcher in NLP and security for the hearing "Modern Scams: How Scammers Are Using Artificial Intelligence and How We Can Fight Back". My contribution appears in the written record.
2024-03-24: I added a page with an example CV for PhD students to my advice pages.
2023-12-10: Our paper The Sentiment Problem: A Critical Survey towards Deconstructing Sentiment Analysis has received an Oustanding Paper Award at EMNLP.
2023-11-30: Scripps Media interviewed me for a story about AI and disinformation. The story was featured in several of Scripps' affiliated TV stations' news broadcasts and on their social media feeds (example).
2023-11-30: A Penn State News article about our TrustNLP Best Short Paper was featured in Penn State Today.
2023-10-26: Thanks to Brandeis University for hosting my invited talk "Natural Language Processing for Privacy and Social Good".
For older news, check the archive.