Directory

S. Shyam Sundar

James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects
CSRAI Director

Department/Unit: Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications

Research Interests: S. Shyam Sundar is James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. His research investigates social and psychological effects of interactive media, including mobile phones, social media, chatbots, robots, smart speakers and algorithms. His experiments investigate the role played by technological affordances in shaping user experience of mediated communications in a variety of interfaces. Current research pertains to fake news, chatbots and smart speakers, AI algorithms, online privacy, social media uses and effects, persuasive aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI), and the strategic use of communication technologies for motivating healthy and prosocial human behaviors.

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Andrea Tapia

Associate Dean for Research
CSRAI Affiliate

Department/Unit: Information Sciences and Technology

Email: axh50@psu.edu

Research Interests: Dr. Tapia is a scholar of Crisis Informatics, the study of information discovery, needs, use and sharing in disaster or crisis settings. Dr. Tapia seeks to develop information and communication technology solutions that promote better decision-making across all responders. Dr. Tapia’s work focuses on making data generated by individuals or social networks via mobile information technologies useful to decision-makers within large institutions. Dr. Tapia’s work contributes to the solution of one of the stickiest problems currently facing emergency response organizations—the organizational inability to take advantage of an abundance of citizen-produced social media data.

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Richard Taylor

Palmer Chair and Professor of Telecommunications Studies and Law Emeritus
CSRAI Affiliate

Department/Unit: Information Policy and Emerging Information Technologies

Email: rdt4@psu.edu

Research Interests: Assessing policy and legal implications of "Datasphere". Legal, political, social and economic impacts of new technologies including AI and "quantum" based applications. Seeking solutions to "irresolvable" normative disputes. Addressing challenges to digital human rights. Seeking theoretical foundation future information policies.

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Farnaz Tehranchi

Assistant Professor
CSRAI Affiliate

Department/Unit: College of Engineering

Email: fjt5064@psu.edu

Research Interests: AI, Cognitive modeling, VR, HCI

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Ted Toadvine

Nancy Tuana Director
CSRAI Steering Committee

Department/Unit: Rock Ethics Institute

Email: tat30@psu.edu

Research Interests: Toadvine’s research over the last two decades has focused on the themes of aesthetics, animality, embodiment, environment, intersubjectivity, nature, ontology, philosophical method, and temporality. He draws inspiration from the phenomenological tradition (especially Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas) as well as deconstruction and post-structuralism (especially Derrida, Nancy, and Deleuze). In 2003, he coined the term “ecophenomenology” to designate an approach to environmental theory that draws on the phenomenological tradition while critically reorienting its relationship with ecology and naturalism. Ecophenomenology is now a recognized field of study across the environmental humanities with proponents in ecocriticism, the arts, architecture, and animal studies, as well as philosophy. His research over the last decade develops a post-naturalistic approach to nature inspired by classic and contemporary sources in the continental tradition, including Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, and Agamben. His first monograph, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Northwestern, 2009), contributes to the theoretical foundations of this new philosophy of nature by showing that Merleau-Ponty's conception of nature, as it develops across his major theoretical works, provides an alternative to naturalistic and constructivist accounts that dominate current environmental theory. Here Toadvine examines the contributions and limitations of Merleau-Ponty’s early Gestalt ontology, his account of radical reflection as a method for disclosing the anonymous level of sensibility and the immemorial past of nature, the radicalization of phenomenology’s investigations of non-human animals, and the significance of his later ontology for environmental concerns. This study lays the philosophical foundations for Toadvine’s original investigations in the philosophy of nature on topics that include nature’s resistance to reflection, the human-animal relation, the temporality of the elements, and biodiacritics.

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Janet van Hell

Professor of Psychology and Linguistics
CSRAI Affiliate

Department/Unit: Psychology; Center for Language Science

Email: jgv3@psu.edu

Research Interests: I study the neural and cognitive mechanisms of child and adult bilinguals' language processing, code-switching, accented-speech processing, and creative language use. I serve as PI on the NSF NRT program "Linguistic diversity across the lifespan: Transforming training to advance human-technology interaction", and as Director of the Center for Language Science.

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Mihail Velikov

Assistant Professor of Finance
CSRAI Affiliate

Department/Unit: Smeal College of Business

Email: velikov@psu.edu

Research Interests: I am interested in working on a paper that would use LLMs coupled with my own code base to automate the production of papers in academic finance.

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Alan Wagner

Assistant Professor
CSRAI Affiliate

Department/Unit: Department of Aerospace Engineering/Rock Ethics Institute

Email: alan.r.wagner@psu.edu

Research Interests: My interest is in developing robots that are capable of interacting with a broad range of humans within a variety of different social situations. I try to ideas from cognitive science to develop methods for robot reasoning. Application areas in emergency evacuation, construction robotics, and game playing.

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