Dr. Shomir Wilson is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2011 and held postdoctoral positions in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. Prior to arriving at Penn State, he was an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department of the University of Cincinnati.

Dr. Wilson directs the Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State, and his research interests span natural language processing (NLP), privacy, and computational social science. A recent focus of his work has been studying digital privacy trends and behaviors using methods from NLP. Privacy is a complicated topic for technology users, and it often involves text as the primary format for organizations' data practices, as well as an important medium for sharing personal information. Dr. Wilson's research explores organizations' data practices at a large scale, yielding qualitative and quantitative knowledge about the state of consumer privacy, and it examines technology users' behaviors to make observations that help them implement their sharing preferences. Additionally, he maintains a broader portfolio of projects to apply NLP to problems in security and fairness in sociotechnical systems.

Dr. Wilson has performed research or teaching activities at several universities abroad, including the Future University of Egypt (a week of guest lectures on AI ethics, 2018), the University of Edinburgh (NSF International Research Fellow, 2013-2014), the National University of Singapore (NSF EAPSI Singapore Fellow, 2010), and Macquarie University (NSF EAPSI Australia Fellow, 2009).

Dr. Wilson chaired a series of workshops on using AI and NLP to support privacy: Privacy and Language Technologies (PLT), a 2016 AAAI Fall Symposium; and Privacy-Enhancing Artificial Intelligence and Language Technologies (PAL), a 2019 AAAI Spring Symposium. He also regularly reviews for major conferences and journals in his field.

You can read more about his work and interests on his website.