Shomir Wilson

My dissertation (2011) on metalanguage in natural language might qualify as an attempt at this, though machine learning was already pulling the field in a different direction.

Shomir Wilson - Where I'm From Origins, identities, and an inescapable question.

I first shared this a year ago. I wanted to write something broadly relatable, for people with lots of different identities and experiences. The stories people shared with me in return make it one of my favorite things I've written. shomir.net/where_from.h...

Reflections on 20 Years as an AI Researcher I first called myself an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher 20 years ago in 2006, when I joined my PhD advisor’s lab. Being an AI…

I wanted to write some big-picture thoughts about AI research, especially for junior researchers. Separating ourselves from the jargon, the cliches, and the false dilemmas allows us to reflect on the stunning changes we're witnessing.
medium.com/@shomir/brie...

I ask Facilities to install mounting points for frames on my office wall two at a time. Because of that, this placeholder has been hiding in plain sight among my publication awards for over a year. Today the SIGCSE Best Paper certificate replaced it.

Hat tip to @askamanager.org for writing this.

Employers: Stop Doing Surprise Phone Interviews It's rude and a bad use of everyone's time.

I hear stories about surprise phone interviews and exploding job offers from my students. Employers, if you want professionalism out of your future employees, remember the power dynamics. The responsibility to be professional starts with you. www.inc.com/alison-green...

Also: When I started writing this, I thought of it as an analytic philosophy paper and especially aligned with traditions from philosophy of language. It's a computing education paper too, but if you want evidence of the importance of the liberal arts for computing, it can be an example.

I really didn’t know what to expect when I submitted this paper. Thanks so much to the reviewers and the organizers of #sigcse2026 for supporting it.

Rethinking How We Discuss the Guidance of Student Researchers in Computing | Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V.1

Also today at #sigcse2026: I’ll present “Rethinking How We Discuss the Guidance of Student Researchers in Computing” (which received a Best Paper Award) this afternoon in the Curriculum Changes session, 3:40pm - 5pm in Meeting Room 260-267. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

If you’re at #sigcse2026 and want to talk about resources for new faculty in computing, come visit me at Poster #42

Thanks to @amyko.phd for an all-timer of a conference keynote on the role of love in computing education. Standing applause at the end. #sigcse2026

I find that explaining topics like these to a general audience is an exercise in thinking about them clearly, and also a lot of fun.

Thanks to the Brookville Area School District for inviting me to give an "Artificial Intelligence 101" talk today during their teacher inservice program. I explained the basics of LLMs to an audience of about 120 K-12 teachers, then shared some of my lab's research on LLMs' social biases.

Interesting. The “best and most authentic” part stopped making sense for me. I’m more pragmatic about identity than I used to be—some teenage ideals are hard to live out—and I hope that I’m nearly the same person in text and in video and IRL, but there are probably differences and I’m fine with that

Same. As another awkward kid during that era, I thought text-only conversations in a chat room were the best and most authentic representation of me. I moved on from that mindset decades ago, but I still prefer writing over video or pictures when sharing my thoughts on social media.

Students say that they learn from my stories, which is gratifying, but sharing them is an opportunity for me to reflect. That kind of arrangement is one of the great things about being a professor.

I talked with students about their travel interests, their plans, and their obstacles. I told them that when I was a college student I was envious of other people's international experiences, but 25 years later I've had much more than I imagined, and the adventures keep coming.

As a faculty participant in Penn State's Distinguished Honors Faculty Program, I recently led a dinner conversation with honors students about international conferences and traveling abroad. I shared stories from some of the 49 countries I've visited.

Four pictures from my recent visit to Singapore for AAAI:
(1) Skyline, Central Business District
(2) Street scene, Little India
(3) Crab-eating macaque, Pulau Ubin
(4) Brown honeyeater, Pulau Ubin

Of the 28,728 authors, 18,453 (64%) were from China and 3,051 (11%) were from the USA. Author quantities are an imprecise measure of research productivity, but these figures reflect a huge shift from a time not long ago when the USA dominated bibliometrics in this field.

AAAI-26 had 30,948 total submissions, ~26K program committee members, ~2K senior program committee members, and ~500 area chairs. The overall acceptance rate across all main track themes was 17.5%.

I recently attended AAAI-26 in Singapore. Here are some figures from the opening ceremony that show the enormous scale and the geopolitics of the conference, and in turn, of AI research.

I’ve done similar. Sometimes when I receive an egregiously strong complaint from a student I track down a professor whose work I appreciated as a student and send them a decades-later update on my successes, along with my thanks.

I once asked a professor colleague in a different department for help identifying a weird rock I found in my yard.

The fact this sign kept falling and I had to cobble together a fix with adhesive velco strips might be allegorical for the current state of AI alignment research.

Later this morning at #AAAI26 in Singapore:

Here’s mine: shomir.net/lab_resource...

Some things about this topic that often surprise people: librarians are faculty at many universities, some faculty have public practices (e.g., doctors and lawyers), and a few faculty don't regularly teach. It's a profession with huge scope, united by the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Note that I didn't aim for this illustration to match any one university, though it might. It's more about nationwide norms at R1 universities than their policies. Thanks to faculty friends at many universities whom I consulted with for their feedback.

Shomir Wilson - Periodic Table of Faculty Job Titles A quick reference for understanding faculty job titles.

If you've wondered about the variety of faculty job titles at US universities, I made a "periodic table" that explains them. It shows the basic duties for each title and organizes them into common promotion lines or tracks. shomir.net/faculty_peri...