Younes Karimi

I am an Informatics Ph.D. candidate at the College of Information Sciences and Technology of Penn State University, and my current research falls at the intersection of social network mining, cybersecurity, and natural language processing. I mainly work with Prof. Anna Squicciarini and Prof. Shomir Wilson, and I am part of the Privacy in Social Computing lab and the Human Language Technologies Lab. My recent studies are primarily focused on extremist and terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/Daesh) and the Islamic Regime in Iran (IR/IRI). My goal is to identify their techniques and strategies for disseminating propagandistic messages on online social networks (OSNs) such as Twitter/X, manipulating online communities, inspiring and influencing people, recruiting new members and sympathizers, and gaining global support. I have collected a large corpus of tweets to fine-tune large language models such as BERT and XLM-RoBERTa and build a user classifier for the automated identification of users supporting the authoritarian regime in Iran. I further model the dynamic behavior of users and analyze their connections, potential coordination, and support networks.

Besides, I am working on two corpora containing millions of privacy policies and question-answer pairs extracted from them and preparing them for public release. I perform large-scale analysis on these datasets to identify common patterns and practices and unique characteristics of the policy documents. I have additionally worked on the privacy of OSNs and used machine learning–based approaches for timely and automated detection of malicious disclosures of sensitive private information on Twitter.

I received my M.Sc. in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, where I worked on a DARPA project to detect and defend NASA JPL employees against phishing, spear phishing, and social engineering attacks in different communication channels such as Email, SMS, and LinkedIn. Besides, I conducted research on online user reviews of Google Play Store Android applications and customer reviews of Amazon products to identify their privacy and security aspects and corresponding user opinions, concerns and complaints. I also studied conformance testing of access control models, security and access control inference of web applications, and privacy of mobile applications.