Computing faculty at research universities are often expected to guide the work of undergraduate and graduate student researchers. This guidance is typically called advising or mentoring, but these terms belie the complexity of the relationship, which includes several related but distinct roles. I examine the guidance of student researchers in computing (abbreviated to research guidance or guidance throughout) within a facet framework, creating an inventory of roles that faculty members can hold. By expanding and disambiguating the language of guidance, this approach reveals the full breadth of faculty responsibilities toward student researchers, and it facilitates discussing conflicts between those responsibilities. Additionally, the facet framework permits greater flexibility for students seeking guidance, allowing them a robust support network without implying inadequacy in an individual faculty member’s skills. I further argue that an over-reliance on singular terms like advising or mentoring for the guidance of student researchers obscures the full scope of faculty responsibilities and interferes with improvement of those as skills. Finally, I provide suggestions for how the facet framework can be utilized by faculty and institutions, and how it can be shared with students for their benefit.

Dr. Shomir Wilson is an associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2011 and held postdoctoral positions in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics.

Dr. Wilson directs the Human Language Technologies Lab, with research spanning natural language processing (NLP), privacy, security, and computational social science. A recent focus of his lab’s work is studying digital privacy practices and technology users’ privacy behaviors using methods from NLP. This work explores organizations’ data practices at a large scale, yielding knowledge about the state of consumer privacy, and also examines how and why people use technology to share personal information. Additionally, his lab has a broad portfolio of projects applying NLP to problems in a variety of sociotechnical systems.

Funding for Dr. Wilson’s research has come from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Funding highlights include an NSF CAREER award to apply NLP to consumer-oriented legal documents and a $1.2M NSF SaTC grant to build large-scale resources for analyzing texts about online privacy practices. His lab has received publication awards from EMNLP, CSCW, WebConf, PETS, DocEng, TeachNLP, and TrustNLP. His public outreach has included written testimony for a U.S. Senate hearing on AI-driven scams, serving for several years as a Grand Awards Judge for the International Science and Engineering Fair, and media appearances in NBC News, Yahoo News, Inside Higher Ed, and Scripps Media.

Dr. Wilson has performed research or teaching activities at several universities abroad, including the Future University of Egypt (a series of guest lectures on AI ethics, 2018), the University of Edinburgh (NSF International Research Fellow, 2013-2014), the National University of Singapore (NSF EAPSI Singapore Fellow, 2010), and Macquarie University (NSF EAPSI Australia Fellow, 2009).

Dr. Wilson maintains a collection of academic advice pages for students and faculty at https://shomir.net/advice.