Hemant Purohit

Hemant Purohit is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology at George Mason University, and Director of the Humanitarian Informatics Lab. He focuses on developing interactive intelligent systems to support emergency services and humanitarian organizations by analyzing non-traditional data sources like social media, web, and IoT using data mining, NLP, and human-centered computing. His work integrates social-psychological theories to enhance human capabilities in crisis contexts.

Purohit holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Wright State University. His research has been recognized through prestigious awards including the ITU Young Innovator Award (2014), NSF CRII Award (2017), and a best paper award at IEEE/WIC/ACM Web Intelligence (2018). His lab is supported by grants from NSF and international agencies.

Key research interests include crisis informatics, social computing, and AI ethics. He has led projects on adversarial scam detection, inclusive cybersecurity, and human-AI teaming for disaster response. Purohit serves on editorial boards for journals like Elsevier's Information Processing & Management and Frontiers in Big Data, and actively contributes to international conferences in his field.

His work emphasizes real-world impact, bridging technical innovation with societal needs through collaborations between researchers and practitioners. Current projects address challenges in multilingual data analysis, social media activism, and resilience data repositories.