UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Yubo Kou, assistant professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), has been awarded the Haile Family Early Career Professorship in Information Sciences and Technology, effective July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2027.
“It is a great honor to receive this endowed professorship,” Kou said. “I deeply appreciate the recognition and support from our college. It has been an incredible journey since I joined in fall 2019, getting to know and learn from my amazing colleagues. This professorship will be instrumental in supporting my upcoming research activities focused on video games and child safety.”
The endowed position was created in 2012 by Don Haile, an emeritus member of the IST Advisory Board, to recruit and retain standout faculty who are in the early stages of their career.
“It’s a chance to help younger faculty, who will hopefully be at the University for a long time,” Haile said when he pledged the funds for the professorship.
The three-year appointment recognizes the importance of Kou’s area of research and provides funding to support his future work.
Kou’s research is in human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work, social computing and video games. Through his research, Kou seeks to understand fun, learning, risk and safety in video games, leveraging a human-centered design approach to enhance user safety and community well-being.
In 2020, he received a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his empirical research on how users in online communities experience moderation decisions such as account suspension. In 2022, Kou received an IST seed grant to support his efforts to design a social learning mechanism that supports users who are punished in online communities. In 2023, he received an NSF grant to support his investigation of harmful design and child safety on metaverse platforms.
Kou’s most current research explores the intersection of governance and play in contexts such as video games, content moderation and metaverse, with a focus on children’s safety and well-being in their online play. He co-runs the Health and Play Lab at Penn State, which conducts HCI research and focuses on health and play as two important human values, exploring how technologies could support people and communities to be healthier and more playful.
“Yubo brings valuable HCI and gaming expertise to the college,” said Andrea Tapia, dean of the College of IST. “His work is so important in an age where technology more and more becomes a part of everyday life. We are thrilled to recognize what he’s achieved and support what he will accomplish through this professorship.”
Kou earned a bachelor's degree in computational and applied linguistics from Peking University and a master’s degree in computer science from Renmin University of China. In 2016, he received his doctoral degree in information and computer sciences from the University of California-Irvine, where he studied video games and civic technology. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University, focusing on understanding user experience design discourse and knowledge on social media. He joined the Penn State faculty in 2019.