Shomir Wilson

[Note: This profile is incomplete, especially with regard to my publications. See http://shomir.net  for many more.]

My research brings together natural language processing (NLP), privacy, and artificial intelligence.

I am interested in solving problems to enable computers to do meaningful work with large volumes of natural language text. My lab develops new methods for NLP and applies them to a variety of domains, including privacy, online social networks, web science, and digital libraries. I am particularly interested in breaking down technology's "walls of text", i.e., situations where a human user or decision-maker is expected to consume a large quantity of text to take action while lacking sufficient resources (time, expertise) to properly understand what they have been given. I have applied this paradigm to privacy policies, scholarly manuscripts, documents from the world wide web, and historical texts, and I am always interested in new domains to work with.

I am an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State, where I lead the Human Language Technologies Lab. I am also a Faculty Affiliate of Penn State's Institute for CyberScience and a member of the Social Data Analytics graduate faculty.

From 2016 until 2018 I was an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at the University of Cincinnati. Prior to that I was a postdoc and a lecturer in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and an NSF International Research Fellow in the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2011.