Interview with a Scholar: Dr. Shomir Wilson (Assoc. Prof. in Information Sciences and Technology)

Some of the obstacles in my education and early career used to feel embarrassing, but I’ve reached a stage where talking about them actually earns me respect from peers and students. Similarly, I went from being afraid of speaking opportunities to being enthusiastic about them, because they’re opportunities to engage with an audience and entertain them. I wish for those kinds of pivots for mentees and junior colleagues. That form of confidence allows you to do even bigger things.

I stumbled across your website by chance. You provide a lot of advice for graduate students and new faculty. What motivated you to start doing this and what kind of reactions have you gotten?

The first advice page I wrote was the “Guide for Joining My Lab“. I originally called it my “Advising FAQ”. I got inspiration from other faculty who wrote advising statements, but I didn’t think they went far enough to explain how doing research with a faculty member works. For example, they assumed that students knew what “advising” is in this context. (Often they don’t!) I wanted to write about the things that career academics often forget that we had to learn.

I shared that page on social media and didn’t expect a big response, but it received 1.2K likes on Twitter (which I no longer use, but you can find me on Bluesky or LinkedIn). Even though it was specific to my lab, people liked the idea of explaining the very basics. Then I wrote a second, the “Guide for Interacting With Faculty“, to explain the typically unsaid expectations that faculty have for students. I targeted first-year undergraduates and international students, but again it received wider attention. University staff (I’m using the US academic vocabulary here, which distinguishes faculty from staff) told me they found it useful for understanding how faculty view their jobs. People outside of academia told me it was interesting to learn what professors do. I kept writing, and I added autobiographical pages based on questions that my students asked. They mentioned seeing in my CV all the places I’ve studied or worked, for example. The “Academia as a Career” guides are relatively new, as I’ve reflected more on my work. I’m still writing, and I don’t think I’ll ever be done with the advice pages, though at some point I’ll have to consider organizing them differently so that people can quickly find what’s relevant to them.

I receive positive reactions when I post these pages to social media, but my favorite feedback comes in conversations or emails. Occasionally people approach me at conferences to say they appreciated what I wrote, or they email me about how my writing helped them to understand what to do or to find the resilience to try something difficult. Knowing that I have an audience like that encourages me to write more.

One of my favourite pieces is “Thoughts on Failure”. On the internet, people post a lot about their successes and it’s rare to see this kind of honesty. You originally wrote the piece in 2020, then added a postscript in 2023. Is there anything you would add now, in 2025, when the higher education landscape looks particularly dire and graduates may be even more hesitant to pursue a career in academia?

First, it’s rare—if ever—that I recommend to people that they pursue academic careers. Being a tenure-line professor is as close as I’ll get to a dream job, and I can say a lot of good things about it, but I’ve had to deal with very difficult parts of it along the way. Tenure-line positions are some of the most elusive jobs even after the long qualification journey, through a PhD and possibly one or more postdoctoral positions. If someone wants to try, then I’m enthusiastic and supportive, but I think it’s a personal choice to try something that difficult. It requires a kind of motivation that should only come from within a person.

You recently gave a keynote talk at the Carnegie Bosch Institute Symposium on Responsible & Sustainable AI, the first symposium of this kind. Can you share some of the key takeaways from the event with us?

This was a two-day conference with several faculty and postdocs speaking about topics in artificial intelligence. “Responsible” and “sustainable” in the symposium title refer to the need for AI to reflect the best human values, especially when its decisions affect large and diverse populations, and for AI not to exceed the resources we can reasonably provide.

I spoke about the tendency for large language models (“LLMs”) like ChatGPT or Copilot to hold biases against certain demographics. This happens because they are trained on large amounts of data from the internet, and people don’t always speak about each other respectfully online. That means if we’re not careful, the output of LLMs reflects negative attitudes against certain populations. I spoke about studies my lab performed to quantify LLMs’ biases against people with disabilities and LLMs’ wide range of biases for and against nationalities.

More broadly, this kind of critical reflection on AI—the harms it could be causing right now and how to mitigate those harms while preserving the benefits—is an important part of realizing the huge impact AI already has on society and our daily lives.

You have published many co-authored articles and chapters. How do you normally manage the collaboration process or does it depend on whom you are working with? Do you have any specific advice for someone who is new to co-authoring?

Coauthoring norms vary by discipline, and in computing it’s normal for students to coauthor with advisors. That’s because we work on research together: often I provide the research problem, the strategy, and guidance along the way, while the students perform hands-on research activities like programming, running experiments, and analyzing results. Because of that, in my discipline co-authorship is a byproduct of working with students. To make sure students are aware of that norm, I include a section about authorship and author order in my “Guide for Research Conferences“. (In computing, conferences are important publication venues: they run peer review of full papers and they publish the accepted ones. They often rival computing journals for prestige.)

Coauthoring with other faculty is common too. At the onset of an interdisciplinary project, when it’s possible a coauthor’s discipline has different norms about authorship and author order, I think it’s helpful to have a conversation about those topics. We typically follow the norms of the discipline that a venue belongs to. In computing venues the student who was the technical lead on the project tends to be first author, followed by the other students, followed by the faculty, and the last author is the faculty member who was the strategic lead on the project. That ordering assumes the students did more hands-on work than the faculty, but there are exceptions. Meanwhile, I’m aware other disciplines may alphabetize all the authors or discourage faculty from coauthoring with their students.

I know you are also a parent as you have written a very personal piece on the experience of your son spending 28 days in NICU last year. What kind of support did you get from your university during that time and how do you generally manage the demands of being both a busy academic and the parent of a young child?

I had arranged for parental leave from work, although that’s not absolute as a professor. For one semester I was excused from teaching and service, but my research advisees still needed to make progress toward their degrees. Prior to my son’s birth I told them that my availability would be limited for a few months. In the meantime, all of them had coadvisors or other faculty collaborators that they could turn to for feedback.

As you mentioned though, my newborn son spent his first month in the NICU. Prior to his birth we had no indication his life would be in danger. Within a few hours he was on a helicopter to a larger hospital, and the next morning I drove there, not knowing where I would stay, how long I would be away from home, or whether I would return newly a parent or newly bereaved. My wife wasn’t well enough to travel yet, so for awhile I was really on my own, figuring out how to be a NICU parent. Even once she arrived, during the weeks that followed, I was even less available to my research advisees than I had expected to be. The connections I had arranged for them became even more essential than we had anticipated.

I don’t know if I have any novel advice about parenting as an academic, beyond what others have already written. It’s difficult to fit in everything, but it’s still OK to have big goals in your career. That might be a theme in the autobiographic advice I’ve written: It’s OK to want to accomplish big things, but the wanting comes with the responsibility to live sustainably, in a personal, internal sense, through difficult times.

On your website, you include photos you took yourself to break up the text. What inspires you to take photos and what’s the story behind your best shot? (I’m hinting at the Guardian series “My Best Shot” here.)

Sharing my travel experiences was a big part of how I got into photography. I’ve had cameras since I was a teenager, but I started paying more attention to photography when I spent a winter living in Australia during graduate school. I wanted to show what I saw, especially the wildlife, with family and friends back in the USA. The next year I spent the summer in Singapore and wanted to share more, and a few years after that I lived for a year in Scotland and used it as a base to explore Europe. Along the way I switched to interchangeable-lens cameras and picked up skills through reading online guides and lots of sheer experience.

I don’t have a “best shot”, but I can think of some from especially memorable circumstances. There’s a picture in “Thoughts on Photography” from Edinburgh’s Beltane Fire Festival, an elaborate pagan ritual with dozens of performers and thousands of spectators. I took that picture at dusk, just before the ceremony started and the first fires were being lit. There was palpable excitement, and I sensed from the arrangements that we were going to be immersed in the show and mingling with performers. That’s what happened, and it was the kind of cultural event that seemed difficult to replicate anywhere else. Among my experiences in Scotland—remember I was there for a year—that was the most foreign and surreal.

Another special one is the shot of a bicycle in a palm forest, in the “Guide for Joining My Lab“. I was in Singapore for a conference in graduate school, still relatively new to the idea of international travel by myself. After the conference I took a ferry out to a Pulau Ubin, one of Singapore’s small outlying islands, and rented a bicycle to pedal around the island. At one point I made a wrong turn and ended up on this path, which became progressively more difficult to follow. I dismounted from my bike and walked a few more steps, then turned around and took this picture. I stood there for awhile afterward, absorbing the scene: not just the visual element, but also the tropical heat and the loud sounds of insects. It was true that I was in Singapore, a very safe and connected country, but it was also true that I was alone and lost in a palm forest on a rural island in Southeast Asia. I didn’t feel concerned as much as I felt excited. That picture represented adventure and personal accomplishment.

Lastly, if there’s anything else you would like to share – what you’re working on right now, any additional words of wisdom, a recommended read – please feel free to do so!

Since you mentioned “Thoughts on Failure”, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a book I’d recommend reading in difficult times, no matter the cause. Frankl’s interpretation of meaning as narrative for experiences is something that’s stayed with me, and it’s a latent theme in some of the advice I’ve written.

Thinking about the transition from early- to mid-career, one thing that has stood out to me is a certain kind of pivot. Some of the obstacles in my education and early career used to feel embarrassing, but I’ve reached a stage where talking about them actually earns me respect from peers and students. Similarly, I went from being afraid of speaking opportunities to being enthusiastic about them, because they’re opportunities to engage with an audience and entertain them. I wish for those kinds of pivots for mentees and junior colleagues. That form of confidence allows you to do even bigger things.

This interview is part of the Interview with a Scholar series.