Research

HLT Lab: The Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State

Natural language is integral to how humanity communicates, synthesizes, and stores information. Our lab's research combines natural language processing (NLP), privacy, security, and computational social science to to enable computers to do meaningful work with large volumes of text. Our work is interdisciplinary, with collaborators in law, public policy, sociology, and other disciplines. To learn more, you can browse our publications or watch videos below.


Venn diagram with circles labeled natural language processing, privacy and security, and computational social science; brief descriptions of research projects inside each area of the diagram
A Venn diagram of a selection of my lab's research projects in 2023.

Our work has received support from The National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, The Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence, The Center for Cybersecurity Research and Education, The Center for Social Data Analytics, The Usable Privacy Policy Project, The Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium, and The Ohio Supercomputer Center.

Videos

In 2025 the Carnegie-Bosch Institute at Carnegie Mellon University recorded a keynote talk I gave at their Symposium on Responsible & Sustainable AI.

In 2023 Auburn University recorded an invited talk that I gave as part of their AI@AU Forum.

I spoke first and last (and in the middle) of 2019 the video below promoting artificial intelligence research at Penn State. (Production credits and press release are here.)

I spoke first in this 2018 video about the NLP components of the Usable Privacy Policy Project. It was part of a series of videos describing a large multi-institution collaborative project.