Recent News

Dr. Pamela Wisniewski participated as a panelist at the Harvard Undergraduate UNICEF Club Conference: 'Empowering Humanity.' The conference aims to enlighten, foster reflective thinking, and spark discussions on the educational obstacles encountered by countless children globally. It also explores the connections and root causes of educational disparities, such as conflict,...

Congratulations to Dr. Pamela Wisniewski who has contributed to a newly published book, titled "Trolley Crash: Approaching Key Metrics for Ethical AI Practitioners, Researchers, and Policy Makers" as one of the chapter authors. She collaborated on the third chapter, "Boiling the Frog: Ethical Leniency due to Prior Exposure to Technology,"...

Congratulations to Naima Ali, Zainab Agha, Neeraj Chatlani, Jinkyung Park, and Pamela Wisniewski on their recent CHI case study acceptance. The case study involved working with seven teens (15-17 years old) in a Youth Advisory Board program for over a year, The authors involved teens in online safety research where...

Congratulations to our Ph.D. student Leena Alghamdi on passing her Candidacy Exam for Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at the University of Central Florida. The Candidacy Exam is the second milestone in the Ph.D. program in which the Graduate Committee evaluates the literature review, research progress, and proposed dissertation studies of...

"Kids making threats at school is nothing new, what's so concerning now is the speed and scale others on social media promote these behaviors,"  Dr. Wisniewski talks to FOX 35 about a recent incident in Florida involving an 11 years boy who fabricated bomb threat because of TikTok. The middle...

Congratulations to our Ph.D. student Xavier Caddle on passing his Candidacy Exam for Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. The Candidacy Exam is the second milestone in the Ph.D. program in which the Graduate Committee evaluates the literature review, research progress, and proposed dissertation studies of...

Congratulations to Zainab Agha, Kelsey Miu, Sophia Piper, Jinkyung Park, and Pamela J. Wisniewski on successfully publishing their conference poster at CSCW '23 Companion: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. The publication titled "Co-Designing User Personas and Risk Scenarios for Evaluating Adolescent Online Safety Interventions" provides an in-depth understanding...

STIR lab is going to present four papers at CSCW 2023. The conference will take place at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis Hotel in Minneapolis, MN USA between October 14 – 18. The four papers the lab is presenting are as follows: “Strike at the Root”: Co-designing Real-Time Social Media Interventions...

"We provide teen-centered design-based recommendations based on co-design with teens that break from the status quo of victim protection, emphasizing on risk prevention and teen empowerment, rather than treating teens like victims.," Says Zinab Agha, a fifth-year PhD candidate, as part of a recently published article in Medium, which is...

Congratulations to Afsaneh Razi, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Seunghyun Kim, Shiza Ali, Gianluca Stringhini, Munmun De Choudhury, and  Pamela Wisniewski for receiving an impact recognition award at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2023). The team was recognized for their work: "Sliding into My DMs: Detecting Uncomfortable or Unsafe Sexual Risk...

"Designing features that let users block others and limit the audience for specific posts allow kids and teens to take the reins of their own safety—which is critical," Says Dr. Wisniewski as part of an article featured in Scientific American magazine about how to keep kids and teens safe online....

“Youth are almost desensitized to some of the violent language that’s out there. So, they’ll bully each other to say, ‘go kill yourself’ or, ‘I’m gonna kill myself’ in conversations that are in group conversations that are joking, and so to some extent, I think the social culture around using...