Soon Ae Chun is a professor and the director of the Information Systems and Informatics program at the College of Staten Island (CSI) and a faculty member of the Computer Science Ph.D. Program and Data Science Masters Program at the Graduate Center (GC) of the City University of New York. She is the director of the NSF sponsored Information Security Research and Education Lab (iSecure Lab). She is the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholarship and the CSI President's Dolphin Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement. She served as the President of the Digital Government Society. She was a visiting scholar at NYU Governance Lab, Seoul National University Center for and at Columbia University Network Security Lab. She is a research fellow at I-DSLA (Institute of Data Science Learning and Application) at Rutgers University. Her research has been funded by NSF, NOAA, NJ State Government Agencies, and PSC-CUNY. She is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM.

Her work in information security and privacy spans the data access control methods for spatial and location-based data, and the methods to avoid conflicts of interest in multi-organizational service execution. She established the NSF Information Security Research and Education (iSecure) Lab. She works on developing knowledge infrastructures for security and privacy. Specifically, her research resulted in a cyber security ontology (i.e., a network of cyber security domain knowledge consisting of concepts and relationships) and a Knowledge Graph linking widely distributed and heterogeneous security learning materials on the Web with the ontology concepts. Her current project involves detecting the privacy risk behaviors in online social media to develop general risk behavior models.

She has contributed to advancing the digital government and Smart Cities, not only by research and development, but also by playing leadership roles, serving as the president and board member of the Digital Government Society, to build a global research community in the field. She established the new ACM Journal of Digital Government Research and Practice, serving as founding editor-in-chief to promote the research and practical knowledge sharing in dedicated digital government issues. As a Fulbright scholar, she collaborated with the Seoul National University Graduate School of Public Administration on research on public policy impacts and risks related to the advanced AI and IoT-driven smart cities. Other digital government projects include citizen service integration, emergency management resource discovery, social media uses for public services, cross-organizational public service workflow customization, public engagement and transparency of policy decision making, geospatial workflow generation, crowd-based environmental planning and policy, and policy ontology development for automatic discovery of services. The NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) program supports her work on smart cities to develop policy impact assessment tools for economic and social mobility using advanced Machine Learning models, and to provide a policy and technology infrastructure for smart cities policy makers and project leaders.

She coined the term Social Health Records (SHR), in contrast to the Electronic Health Records (EHR), where the patient generated health data on diverse social media could bring great insights into understanding population-level health-related risk behaviors and healthcare behaviors, divergent from the clinical orders. She has worked on building Social Health Records (SHRs) from these “real-time” social media data by collecting and linking them for analytics and reasoning by data science and AI technologies, to understand health behaviors as well as to detect emerging and evolving epidemic outbreaks and spreads. The current projects include a large-scale monitoring to detect drug abuse-related SHR and to enhance our understanding of population level drug-abuse-related risk behavior patterns, trends and hotspots to reduce the opioid epidemics.

Shorter Version


Last Revised: