Appointed 2022-23 GIST President
The Graduate Student association in the College of Information Science and Technology (GIST) President is a prominent leadership role for a Ph.D./Masters student within Penn State’s College of Information Science and Technology. The GIST serves as the official representative body for over 500 graduate students in the College, covering diverse programs.
As GIST President, I am responsible for executing a vision that addresses the needs and enhances the overall graduate student experience within the College. Key duties include facilitating regular GIST meetings, communicating student feedback to the College administration, managing a committee team focused on events/activities, overseeing a budget, and fostering an inclusive community. I also use this opportunities to spearhead new initiatives that enrich professional development and social connections for IST graduate students during their time at Penn State.
This is a 1-year appointed term that is highly regarded within the College of IST for demonstrating excellence in leadership, communication, organizational management, and representation of fellow graduate students’ interests. As such, the GIST President plays an integral role as the voice of the graduate student community.
Jason Lucas
Ph.D. Student in Informatics
My research interests include low-resource multilingual NLP, linguistics, adversarial machine learning and mis/disinformation generation/detection. My Ph.D. thesis is in the area of applying artificial intelligence for cybersecurity and social good, with a focus on low-resource multilingual natural language processing. More specifically, I develop NLP techniques to promote cybersecurity, combat mis/disinformation, and enable AI accessibility for non-English languages and underserved populations. This involves creating novel models and techniques for tasks like multilingual and crosslingual text classification, machine translation, text generation, and adversarial attacks in limited training data settings. My goal is to democratize state-of-the-art AI capabilities by extending them beyond high-resource languages like English into the long tail of lower-resourced languages worldwide. By innovating robust learning approaches from scarce linguistic data, this research aims to open promising directions where AI can have dual benefits strengthening security, integrity and social welfare across diverse global locales.