UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) recently announced eight projects that will receive funding from the college’s seed grant program.

The program provides preliminary funding to support research activities and generate preliminary results that will eventually lead to bigger projects involving external funding. IST faculty wrote short proposals, which were reviewed by representatives of the college’s diverse faculty. The highest-rated proposals were recommended to IST’s dean and awarded on a competitive basis.

“We are excited to support these early-stage projects with initial funding that span our four core areas — data sciences and artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, privacy and security, and social and organizational informatics,” said Andrea Tapia, associate dean for research in IST. “These projects represent the unique interdisciplinary approaches our researchers pursue to address ongoing issues and develop innovative solutions to emerging challenges.”

The eight projects selected for funding are:

• “Towards Accessibility-Aware Human-Centered Image Segmentation for People with Disabilities” by Syed Billah, assistant professor of IST, and Md Alimoor Reza, assistant professor at Drake University. The project aims to design accessible segmentation algorithms — which partition an image into meaningful regions and assign descriptive labels to each — to unlock their potential for people with disabilities.
   
• “On the Vulnerability of Distillation Based Federated Learning Under Backdoor Attacks” by Jinghui Chen, assistant professor of IST. The project seeks to new understandings of the vulnerabilities of distillation-based federated learning — a machine learning technique through which local clients collaboratively train a global model without sharing clients' original data — and help build more robust federated learning methods for security-critical applications.
   
• “Democratic Metaverse: Recovering Truth from Ranking Data” by Hadi Hosseini, assistant professor of IST, and Debmalya Mandal, postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. The project aims to address the shortcomings of voting in digital platforms by developing novel algorithmic solutions for aggregating the opinion of the crowd when information about preference data is incomplete, noisy or contains misinformation.
   
• “Testing the Binding Layer of Scripting Languages through Cooperative Mutation” by Hong Hu, assistant professor. The project aims to better protect popular document-processing software applications by testing the binding layers in scripting languages used to simplify file modification.
   
• “Designing a Social Learning Mechanism to Support Punished Users” by Yubo Kou, assistant professor of IST. The project aims to design a social learning mechanism that supports users who are punished in online communities by encouraging the exchange of ideas between punished users and community members, so that the former can better evaluate their past behaviors against community norms and platform policies.
   
• “Integrating Privacy Literacy in School Librarian Pedagogy and Practice” Priya Kumar, assistant professor of IST. The project will examine whether and how school librarians incorporate privacy and security into their educational efforts.
   
• “Sensing the Surface: A Computer Vision Analysis of Claude Monet’s Water Lily Paintings” by James Z. Wang, distinguished professor of IST; Kathryn Brown, senior lecturer in art history and visual culture at Loughborough University; and Jia Li, professor in the Penn State Eberly College of Science. The project aims to develop state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms to analyze high-resolution images of Monet paintings that will shed new light on the works’ style and open new narratives about Impressionist painting.
   
• “Procedural and Distributive Justice in Minoritized Technology Job Seekers' Experiences with AI Hiring Systems” by Lynette Yarger, associate professor of IST and assistant dean for equity and inclusion at the Schreyer Honors College. The project aims to examine minoritized technology job seekers’ perspectives on fairness and equity in AI hiring systems to direct equitable policies for the design and use of these systems, determine potential injustices embedded in the predictions made by algorithms, and identify the impacts of these systems on minoritized technology job seekers.

More information about research led by the College of IST, including research areas, centers and labs, and current projects, can be found at ist.psu.edu/research.