Kenneth Joseph receives distinguished teaching and mentoring award

By Elizabeth Egan 

The award recognizes the impact that quality teaching and mentoring can have on student’s experience and academic achievement. Recipients of the award are chosen based on nominations from their departments that include letters of support from faculty and students.

“This award is much more a testament to the students who I am lucky enough to have worked with than it is to anything I do or have done,” said Joseph. “I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked with folks from The Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP), The Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and elsewhere. I have learned as much or more from them as they have learned from me.”

As a professor, Joseph has appreciated the opportunity to witness the success of his students and watch them become genuinely excited about their work.

When it comes to teaching undergraduate students, Joseph noted three qualities that he considers to be important for a mentor to possess. Joseph said the most important quality is humility, saying, “You need to understand that there are different kinds of expertise in this world, and that your personal and professional experiences only equip you with one kind of expertise. Students have other kinds of expertise that are equally valuable for research.”

The second is patience, “You need to enjoy the process as much as the outcome and understand that at one point you didn't know anything about research either,” said Joseph. Finally, enthusiasm, “Students have many demands on their time,” continued Joseph. “One thing I've learned the hard way is that I need to be clear that I really love the research I get to do, and that I want the students to love their work too.”

In addition to the typical computer science courses taught by Joseph, he has also collaborated with Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller, an associate professor in UB’s Department of History, and Atri Rudra, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, to use Muller’s “Impossible Project” approach to pedagogy to provide students with the experience of taking an untraditional class that merges history and computer science. Through Muller’s Impossible Project approach, students are challenged to use their skillsets to solve a seemingly impossible issue in one semester. Joseph has helped to guide the students in creating solutions that could make computing anti-racist and end white supremacy.

Joseph joined UB as an assistant professor in 2018 from Northeastern University where he was a postdoctoral fellow. He currently serves as the associate director of AI and society in UB’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. As a researcher, Joseph runs the computation and equity at UB Lab (cUBelab), where his goal is to help understand and address social inequality through the development and use of new measures, models, and computational tools.

In 2022 Joseph received an NSF CAREER Award for a project that focused on leveraging large-scale data from social media and survey data to understand attitudes towards racial inequality in the United States. He also received UB’s Exceptional Scholar Young Investigator Award in 2021.

Joseph earned his PhD and master’s degree in societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University and his bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Joseph will be recognized along with the other award recipients, Joan Baizer, professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysic, and Omer Gokcumen, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, at a breakfast in February 2025, hosted by the Office of Fellowships and Scholarships.