UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) not too long ago chosen five projects to obtain funding from its seed grant program. The 2026–2027 funding goals to help interdisciplinary research actions and generate preliminary outcomes that will lead to larger projects involving exterior funding.
Members of the IST college wrote brief proposals that have been reviewed by their friends and awarded on a aggressive foundation. The 16 proposals submitted spanned the school’s three departments: Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics, Informatics and Intelligent Systems and Privacy and Cybersecurity Informatics.
“These projects reflect IST’s foundational character as an interdisciplinary college,” mentioned Carleen Maitland, affiliate dean for research and graduate affairs within the College of IST. “Two projects contain collaborators from different faculties — the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, the College of the Liberal Arts and the College of Medicine. Two others contain college from totally different departments throughout the school. Beyond interdisciplinarity, the projects replicate strategic instructions for our research. In specific, two projects contribute to the groundbreaking areas of safety for prolonged actuality and synthetic intelligence (AI) for software program safety. Another two contribute to key affect areas of kids’s on-line security and AI and wellness.”
The following projects have been chosen for funding.
“Beyond English: Benchmarking Large-Language Model (LLM) Clinical Safety and Appropriateness for Multilingual Mental Health Support”
- Principal investigator (PI): Saeed Abdullah, affiliate professor, IST Department of Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics, and school affiliate, Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence
- Co-PIs: Guodong Liu, professor; Dahlia Mukherjee, Hershey Medical Center Manager; and Sanjay Yadav, affiliate professor; all from the College of Medicine; S. Shyam Sundar, Evan Pugh University Professor and James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects, Bellisario College, and director, Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence
“Data Infrastructure and Identity Work in AI Companionship”
- PI: Dana Calacci, assistant professor, IST Department of Informatics and Intelligent Systems, and school co-hire, Institute for Computational and Data Sciences
- Co-PI: Ariana Steele, Gil Watz Early Career Professor in Language and Linguistics, College of the Liberal Arts
“LLM-Driven Semantic Oracles for Automated Detection and Repair of Software Logic Vulnerabilities”
- PI: Hong Hu, assistant professor, IST Department of Privacy and Cybersecurity Informatics
- Co-PI: Jinyuan Jia, assistant professor, IST Department of Privacy and Cybersecurity Informatics
“Risk Exposure and Harm Reduction in Children’s Online Gambling”
- PI: Xinning Gui, assistant professor, IST Department of Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics, and school affiliate, Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence
- Co-PI: Yubo Kou, Haile Family Early Career Professor, IST Department of Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics, and school affiliate, Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence
“Extended to Reality: Prompt Injection in 3D Environments”
- PI: Ying Chen, assistant professor, Department of Human-Centered Computing and Social Informatics
- Co-PI: Jinyuan Jia, assistant professor, IST Department of Privacy and Cybersecurity Informatics