Steven M. Schneider
steve@sunypoly.edu
Professor of Information Design & Technology | Co-Director, AI Exploration Center | SUNY Polytechnic Institute
AI for the Public Good Fellow, 2025–2026 | State University of New York
As Co-Director of the AIX Center at SUNY Polytechnic Institute, I lead applied research initiatives exploring AI across diverse institutional and community contexts. Current projects examine AI deployment in higher education, workforce development, and public-sector settings.
I co-conceptualized the AIX Workbench, an open-source platform designed to enable secure, locally-run AI experimentation for faculty and students without reliance on commercial cloud infrastructure. The workbench supports reproducible research, data privacy, and pedagogical exploration of large language models.
As a 2025–2026 AI for the Public Good Fellow of the State University of New York, I am developing frameworks for responsible AI integration in public higher education — addressing equity, transparency, and institutional governance.
My current scholarly work includes designing AI for All curricula that teach students to engage with open-source AI tools responsibly, securely, and collaboratively. This encompasses course design research, assessment methodology, and critical evaluation of LLM-generated artifacts in academic contexts.
The AIX Center is conducting research on how consultation with large language models affects analytical work products and team interaction patterns in complex information environments. Current work focuses on building infrastructure for capturing observable traces of human-AI interactions and developing evaluation frameworks for analytic quality. Applications span information campaign assessment, higher education advising, municipal policy development, and other organizational decision-making contexts. The center is currently recruiting a postdoctoral associate to lead this work.
WebArchivist.org was a research organization co-directed with Kirsten Foot (University of Washington), dedicated to developing tools and strategies for studying the ephemeral Web. Working in partnership with the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the project produced major collections including the Election 2000 Collection, the September 11 Web Archive (recognized by Yahoo! Internet Life as Site of the Year), and the Election 2002 Collection. In 2005, WebArchivist.org collaborated with the Singapore Internet Research Center and Nanyang Technological University on the Asian Tsunami Web Archive, capturing approximately 1,600 websites from 40 countries in 13 languages. WebArchivist.org also maintained a research partnership with the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (KNAW, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences).
Web Campaigning (MIT Press, 2006), co-authored with Kirsten Foot. Recipient of the APSA Doris Graber Award for best book on information technology and politics. Introduced the concept of the web sphere as an analytical unit for studying online political action.
The Internet and National Elections: A Comparative Study of Web Campaigning (Routledge, 2007), co-edited with Randolph Kluver, Nicholas Jankowski, and Kirsten Foot. Comparative analysis of web use across 21 national elections worldwide using web sphere analysis.