Recent News

"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...

Congratulations to STIR lab PhD candidate Zainab Agha for winning the Gary Marsden Travel Awards to attend the CSCW conference. The Gary Marsden Travel Awards support graduate students in attending ACM SIGCHI conferences.

“Now it’s not just trying to protect youth online from bad actors who are real people, it’s also trying to understand the types of interactions they are having with these generative AI and open source chat platforms,” Dr. Wisniewski talks to News 2 regarding how AI is adding new complexity...

Congrats to StirLab students Naima and Neeraj for wrapping up the final Teenovate YAB meeting. Find more about Teenovate here.

“We need to be careful to not use social media as our societal scapegoat,” Dr. Wisniewski talks to News2 in lieu of Tennesse school district suing big tech companies like Snapchat and TikTok. Dr. Wisniewski said these platforms also allow marginalized groups like LGBTQ teens and those on the autism spectrum...

Congrats to STIR Lab student Zainab Agha for getting accepted into the doctoral consortium at the ACM Interaction Design for Children conference, held in Chicago from June 19-23rd. https://idc.acm.org/2023/ The doctoral consortium is a closed event where accepted Ph.D. students get an opportunity to discuss first results, future plans, stumbling...

Congratulations Ph.D. Student Sarvech Qadir on conducting a seminar on "Mastering Statistical Analysis and Visualization using JASP" at Vanderbilt LIVE Summer Research Program. In this session, participants learned how to use JASP, a free and open-source statistical software program that can be used to import data from a variety of...

Congratulations to Dr. Wisniewski for being selected to attend the inaugural CRA Leadership Academy for Faculty (https://cra.org/cra-leadership-academy-for-faculty/). The CRA Leadership Academy cultivates future leaders in computing and computing research through a one-day in-person workshop and follow-up virtual meetings among the Leadership Academy cohort.  Participants will learn new skills and perspectives on leadership,...

Congratulations to our Ph.D. student Zainab Agha on passing her Qualifying Exam (QE) for Ph.D. in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. The Qualifying 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 the student....

Congratulations to Dr. Katie Park for presenting her Paper at WWW '23 Companion: Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023. Towards Automated Detection of Risky Images Shared by Youth on Social Media Jinkyung Park, Joshua Gracie, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Gianluca Stringhini, Vivek Singh, Pamela Wisniewski Abstract: With the growing ubiquity...

Congratulations to our Ph.D. Candidate Mamtaj Akter on her CHI LBW paper acceptance. It Takes a Village: A Case for Including Extended Family Members in the Joint Oversight of Family-based Privacy and Security for Mobile Smartphones Mamtaj Akter, Leena Alghamdi, Jess Kropczynski, Heather Lipford, Pamela Wisniewski Abstract: We conducted a...