Join faculty researchers from the College of IST as they discuss and engage with their research in our "Research Talks" series.
Cindy Lin, assistant professor at the Penn State College of Information Sciences in Technology, will present "Algorithmic Fairness in Collective Decision-Making" on February 8, 2024 as part of the IST Research Talks series.
Abstract
How can we comprehend rapidly shifting environments that exceed both longstanding patterns and historical trends? In Indonesia, environmental scientists and computer engineers in government and industry have turned to data science to broaden their range of emergency responses to fires they can no longer control. This talk draws on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork with government and industry scientists to argue that environmental governance practices are shifting in the Global South. These changes bear important lessons for ongoing attempts to secure livable futures in the West.
Prior technologies were designed to monitor and map large-scale shifts in fire patterns and land conditions from afar. However, data science in land mapping and fire prediction has opened new frames of reference for observing and preventing volatile fires. These shifts have shattered public and professional expectations of how environmental disasters can be handled.
Lin will discuss recent attempts to integrate data science into fire and land mapping and prediction in Indonesia and demonstrate how competing methods to measure environmental change have altered the legitimacy of government science and engineering institutions, with universal claims to cartographic exactitude narrowly pitted against data science, rather than a broader understanding of emergent environmental risks.
 | About the Speaker Cindy Lin is an assistant professor in the social and organizational informatics area of the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology. Lin’s research draws on long-term fieldwork with environmental scientists, computer engineers, and cloud architects in government and industry to examine the politics of computational labor and data architectures for subterranean peatland fire control in Indonesia. She is currently working on a book that examines ground truth within the history of machine learning as a shifting political and scientific category. This book asks how ground truth and its claim to accuracy and evidentiality have shaped and been shaped by transnational exchanges of mapping, surveying, and computing expertise between Southeast Asia and the United States. As an information scholar, Lin’s work is located at the intersection of postcolonial and feminist science and technology studies, critical data studies, the history of computing, and environmental justice. Her work has been published in leading computing venues, including ACM CHI, DIS, and PD, and has been featured in Social Text and CoDesign. Her graduate studies and research have been funded by the National Science Foundation, Dow Sustainability Fellows Program, Rackham Graduate School, and the International Institute at the University of Michigan. Lin is the co-author of Technoprecarious, a multigraph written with Precarity Lab analyzing the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. She was also the co-director of DoIIIT, an interactive design and making studio. Before joining Penn State, Lin was a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, affiliated with the Department of Information Science. She was also a Digital Life Initiative visiting fellow at Cornell Tech. She holds a doctoral degree from The University of Michigan School of Information and a graduate certificate from The University of Michigan’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. | |
Past Talks
Peng Liu, Raymond G. Tronzo, MD Professor of Cybersecurity at the Penn State College of Information Sciences in Technology, presented "AI for Cybersecurity: Current Status and the Role of GPT-4" on September 14, 2023 as part of the IST Research Talks series.
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Abstract
In this talk, Liu will briefly summarize the past 30 years of academic research in systems security. The summary is anchored by a few "broken heart" findings, which partially motivate the applications of AI/ML technologies. Second, he will review the current status of AI for cybersecurity. Finally, Liu will discuss why LLMs such as GPT-4 are likely the biggest X factor in the field of cybersecurity.
 | About the Speaker Peng Liu received his BS and MS degrees from the University of Science and Technology of China, and his PhD from George Mason University in 1999. Dr. Liu is a Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, founding Director of the Center for Cyber-Security, Information Privacy, and Trust, and founding Director of the Cyber Security Lab at Penn State University. His research interests are in many areas of computer security. He has published a monograph and over 270 refereed technical papers. His research has been sponsored by NSF, ARO, AFOSR, DARPA, DHS, DOE, AFRL, NSA, TTC, CISCO, and HP. He has served as a program (co-)chair or general (co-)chair for over 10 international conferences (e.g., Asia CCS 2010, CNS 2018) and workshops (e.g., ACM MTD 2016). | |
Xinning Gui, Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, delivers a research talk titled "Exploring and Enhancing Transparency and Explainability of Consumer-Facing Health Technology" on October 12, 2023.
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 | Xinning Gui Xinning Gui received her B.A. in Chinese Literature and Linguistics from Peking University, her M.A. in Chinese Modern and Contemporary Literature from Beijing Normal University, and completed her Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California Irvine. Gui's research focuses on health informatics in the context of human-computer interaction. | |
Kelley Cotter, assistant professor, gave an IST Research Talk titled “Manifesting AI: Mystical Mentalities in Human-Machine Interactions" on November 16, from 12:00-1:00 p.m. in E202 Westgate Building,
What people know about data-centric technologies shapes human-machine interactions with regard to trust, reliance, agency, and control. While a conventional interpretation of "knowledge" focuses on understanding how a system operates, Cotter positions this as one of many ways of seeing and knowing data-centric technologies.
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 | Kelley Cotter Kelley Cotter is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at The Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph.D. in information and media from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in library and information science from Drexel University. Her research explores how data-centric technologies shape social, cultural, and political life, and vice versa. Her most recent work focuses on how people learn about and make sense of algorithms, and how such insight may be mobilized in efforts to govern platforms. Dr. Cotter’s work has been published in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, and the proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). | |
Join Hong Hu, assistant professor, for an IST Research Talk titled "Spotting Syscall-Guard Variables for Data-Only Attacks." This talk was given on December 12, 2023.
In this talk, Hu identifies an important category of critical data—syscall-guard variables—and proposes novel solutions to automatically detect such variables in a scalable manner. Syscall-guard variables determine to invoke security-related system calls—syscalls—and altering them will allow attackers to request extra privileges from the operating system. Hu proposes branch force, which intentionally flips every conditional branch during execution and checks whether new security-related syscalls are invoked. If so, one can conduct data-flow analysis to estimate the feasibility to flip such branches through common memory errors.
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 | Hong Hu Dr. Hong Hu is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology of PennState University. His main research area is system and software security, focusing on exploring new attack vectors of memory errors and developing effective defense mechanisms. His work has appeared in top venues of system security, including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, CCS and NDSS. He received the Best Paper Award from CCS 2019 and ICECCS 2014. Dr. Hu obtained his Ph.D. degree from the National University of Singapore in 2016. After that, he was a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist at Georgia Tech from 2017 to 2020. | |
Hadi Hosseini, assistant professor at the Penn State College of Information Sciences in Technology, presented "Algorithmic Fairness in Collective Decision-Making" on January 30, 2024 as part of the IST Research Talks series.
Abstract
As artificial intelligence continues to rapidly transform the ways social, political, and commercial decisions are governed, fairness has become a pivotal concern in algorithmic and collective decision-making. It plays an instrumental role in the allocation of public and private resources both in centralized and distributed settings, ranging from the distribution of scarce medical resources (e.g., vaccines) in federated healthcare and the distribution of tasks in digital gig economy (e.g., ridesharing platforms) to the collective development of foundation models in data-oriented systems. These decisions require input from multiple self-interested entities (a.k.a. agents) that often have conflicting preferences. In this talk, Hosseini will describe some of the nuances in designing fair and robust algorithmic solutions for collective decision-making, give several examples for achieving approximate fairness through techniques that are rooted in economics and computer science, and discuss recent advances in bringing human value judgments into designing fairness axioms.
 | About the Speaker Hadi Hosseini is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. A member of the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence area, Hosseini’s research focuses on problems related to artificial intelligence and multiagent systems, including problems at the interface of computer science and economics. He studies different aspects of self-interested players in multiagent systems and develops algorithms and theoretical techniques to achieve certain computational and game-theoretical properties. Hosseini’s research is supported by an NSF CAREER Award, an NSF Medium RI Award, and an NSF CRII Award. He is an associate director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Engineered Systems (CAFE) and affiliated with both the Computer Science Theory Group and the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. Prior to joining Penn State, Hosseini was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rochester Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his doctorate in computer science at the University of Waterloo. | |