Robert Thomson

Award-winning teaching professor with versatile expertise in computational modeling, human-centered cybersecurity, cognitive security, and behavior modeling. Dr. Robert Thomson is a Teaching Professor in Informatics and Intelligent Systems in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. He has more than 15 years of experience supporting cutting edge research from DARPA, IARPA, ARPA-H, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Laboratory, and the National Institute for Health, and has been an invitational member of four DARPA ISAT panels studying cybersecurity, human decision-making, and adversarial influences to cognition.

• Cognitive Security: How do we make sense of the world when we cannot trust the information? The old adage "believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see" is now considered optimistic in the age of adversarial AI generated content. For every piece of information we consume, we need to treat it like an agent: the sum of all the targeted algorithms that served it to us. How do we defend our cognition in online spaces? I study the critical thinking strategies that support resilient decision-making even when you cannot trust your senses.
  
• Computational Modeling: Many people have argued that cognition is too complex to model appropriately, while some others assume that decision-making is a solved problem. The truth lies somewhere in between. I study the underlying computational mechanisms that underly statistical learning in the environment, predicting human behavior under adversarial conditions. This has been applied to study the origin and remediation of cognitive biases, to support critical thinking strategies, and to act as a decision support system for analysts to monitor their performance.
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College of Information Sciences and Technology welcomes six new faculty members