Department of Informatics and Intelligent Systems

Center for Big Data and Discovery Informatics

The Center for Big Data Analytics and Discovery Informatics aims to accelerate advances in a number of fields by addressing the challenges in data management, data integration, data analytics, and predictive modeling and simulation to realize the full potential of big data. Our researchers seek to understand how scientists, decision makers, and the public at large can use this wealth of information to drive not only scientific discovery but also decisions and policies.

Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory

The Intelligent Information Systems Research Laboratory aims to explore and support all levels of research that will improve and enhance our ability to generate, manage, search, and mine information and knowledge. Current research covers internet database design and analysis, mobile web computing, web mining and navigation, web agents, novel and intelligent web tools, multimedia retrieval, web and internet models, web usage, automatic content analysis and digital libraries, web search, niche search engines, and information retrieval.

Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

The Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AAI Lab) conducts foundational and applied research on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science. Our projects explore the applications of AI in cyber-physical systems with a focus on smart and connected communities and critical infrastructure (e.g., transportation and energy) and in cybersecurity.

FAIR Lab

The FAIR Lab @ Penn State conducts foundational research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, economics, and computation. Our goal is to design novel principled solutions for robust and fair decision-making in the presence of multiple intelligent entities (e.g., humans, robots, or autonomous agents). These AI solutions have profound impact on several real-world applications ranging from healthcare resource allocation and refugee placement to recommendation systems and gig economies.

PSU Data Science Lab

PSU Data Science Lab is a team of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. They are conducting cutting-edge researches on data mining, machine learning, healthcare informatics, natural language processing, and security. Their mission is to develop advanced data mining and machine learning approaches to solve real-world problems.

Crowd-AI Laboratory

The Crowd-AI Laboratory focuses on combining artificial intelligence with crowdsourcing to create systems that are more usable, robust, and intelligent. Our researchers work on real-time crowdsourcing, conversational agents, technical human-computer interaction, and natural language processing to understand how people can use automated technologies in context and how automated technologies serve people’s practical needs.

Data Science and Machine Learning Lab

The Data Science and Machine Learning Lab was founded by Dr. Suhang Wang in 2018. We conduct cutting-edge research on data mining, machine learning and graph mining with applications to social media mining, recommender systems and healthcare. Some ongoing projects include effective labeled data generation via GAN, trustworthy graph neural networks (interpretable, robust, fair and privacy-preserving), and causal recommender systems.

HAX Lab

The primary mission of HAX Lab is to build and enhance online learning environments by contributing to the hax.psu.edu web service. This open-source community provides free services to anyone at the University. We welcome contributors from all backgrounds and interests and are committed to developing a sustainable ecosystem of advanced web-building solutions that are ultimately costs-less, portable, and easy for faculty, students, staff, and developers to dream with. Our community's work includes programming (full stack), UI/UX design, Data Sciences/AI, learning design, education technology development, and more.

The RAISE Lab

The RAISE Lab at Penn State is a group of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers that makes foundational contributions to the field of Responsible AI for Social Emancipation. Our goal is to advance the state-of-the-art in AI tools and algorithms to solve critical challenges faced by marginalized communities around the world, while ensuring that our algorithms do not exacerbate existing health, social, and economic inequities in society.

Penn State Information, Knowledge, and wEb (PIKE) Laboratory

The Penn State Information, Knowledge, and Web Laboratory—also known as PIKE—researches issues involving the management of and mining in data in diverse forms, including structured records, text, multimedia, social media, and web. Current and past projects have focused on developing computational techniques to detect and prevent fake news, creating a fairness-aware recommendation engine between cybersecurity job postings and job seekers' skills, and advancing machine learning methods to model the psychological phenomenon known as memory illusion.

PLAINTEXT Lab

The Penn State Laboratory for AI that’s iNTerpretable, eXplainable, and Testable. Their mission bridges research, implementation, and comprehension related to human interaction with Artificial Intelligence.

Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Scientific Applications (CENSAI)

The Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Scientific Applications (CENSAI) aims to foster collaborative, interdisciplinary research across Penn State and beyond aimed at addressing the AI grand challenge of accelerating scientific progress through synergistic advances across multiple areas of AI, including literature-based discovery, scientific knowledge representation, experiment planning and optimization, machine learning and causal inference, and human-AI collaboration.

Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory

The Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory conducts research in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, information integration, and semantic web. Its projects explore applications in bioinformatics, engineering informatics, cheminformatics, materials informatics, social informatics, and related areas.

Knowledge Visualization Laboratory

The Knowledge Visualization Laboratory seeks to understand the frontier issues in visual analytics, an area with a goal to augment data-driven decision-making by bridging computational capacities of computing systems and analytical skills of human beings. Our research focuses on the visualization-based tools that have become essential to human-data interaction by exploring the relevant cognitive theories, such as visual cognition, problem-solving theories, and learning theories, that impact human-computer interaction and decision-making.

ISCL: The Interdisciplinary Scientific Computing Laboratory

ISCL performs research at the intersection of data science, applied mathematics, and high-performance computing for solving grand challenge problems in computational science. Our research projects aim to solve problems in predictive modeling for dynamical systems arising in geophysical, nuclear fusion, and engineering applications.

Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence

The Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence is a multi-unit initiative that promotes the thoughtful development and application of AI and studies its impact on all areas of human endeavor. In addition to supporting research focused explicitly on AI for social good and mitigating threats from its misuse, through this center, Penn State encourages that all AI research and development activities consider social and ethical implications as well as intended and possible unintended consequences.

AI for Cyber Security through Big Data

Harvesting big data related to cyber security using AI requires the identification of (1) use-inspired problems that can be addressed using AI, and (2) cyber security challenges that require the advancement of fundamental topics in AI. This research lab aims to achieve both goals by leveraging related real-world big data.

Penn State Open Source Program Office

The Penn State Open Source Program Office is dedicated to fostering a thriving culture of open source software development, use, and collaboration. They are committed to advancing the knowledge, skills, and opportunities for students, faculty, and the broader Penn State community in the open source domain.

Human Language Technologies Laboratory

The Human Language Technologies Laboratory aims to solve problems to enable computers to do meaningful work with large volumes of text. Natural language is crucial to how humans communicate, synthesize, and store information. Our researchers develop methods for natural language processing and apply them to a variety of domains, including privacy, online social networks, web science, and digital libraries.