Rate My Professor Loni Hagen

Loni Hagen is an Associate Professor of Data Science in the School of Information at the University of South Florida. She earned her Ph.D. in Information Science from the University at Albany, SUNY in 2016, M.A.S. from the University of Tokyo in 2004, M.A. from Yonsei University in 2003, and B.A. from the Korean National Police University in 1996. Prior to her academic career, Hagen worked over ten years in law enforcement positions in Korea, including as an e-government specialist at the Headquarters of the Korean National Police Agency and instructor at the Police Comprehensive Academy. She received the Commissioner’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000 and the Commissioner’s Award for Outstanding Work as an Information Management Specialist in 2006.

Hagen’s research focuses on human-centered data science methodologies to apply artificial intelligence and big data analytics for social science research and government decision-making. Her academic interests include computational social science, e-participation, social media analytics, cybersecurity, privacy, public health crises, and undergraduate data science education. She has published in prominent journals such as the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Information Processing & Management, Social Science Computer Review, and JMIR Infodemiology. Key publications comprise “Human-supervised data science framework for city governments: A design science approach” with Patel and Luna Reyes (2023), “The role of influential actors in fostering the polarized COVID-19 vaccine discourse on Twitter” with Fox et al. (2022), “Rise of the Machines? Examining the Influence of Social Bots on a Political Discussion Network” with Neely et al. (2020), “Content Analysis of E-petitions with Topic Modeling: How to Train and Evaluate LDA Models?” (2018), and “Crisis Communications in the Age of Social Media: A Network Analysis of Zika-Related Tweets” with Keller et al. (2018). Her scholarship has been cited over 1,754 times. Hagen earned the 2024-2025 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to conduct research on human supervision of artificial intelligence at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Further honors include the Best Management Paper Award at the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (2019) and the Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University at Albany, SUNY (2016). She serves on the Digital Government Society board, as conference program co-chair and special interest group chair, and hosts computational methods workshops. Her work receives support from the National Research Foundation of Korea and the Florida Center for Cybersecurity.