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

“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

“As parents and educators, it is our job to teach Autistic teens these skills, so that they can become well-formed and independent adults. Autistic teens can disproportionately benefit and be harmed online; therefore, it is important to take evidence-based precautions

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

Congratulations to Stirlab Ph.D. Student Mamtaj Akter for getting featured by the Vanderbilt School of Engineering for the work on developing community-based app for managing mobile privacy and security. Check out here to learn more.

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

Congratulations Dr. Wisniewski for presenting at the workshop hosted by Encode Justice Florida and Stand for Freedom to speak to researchers and leaders on why include technology in racial justice and the steps one can take. Watch the full video

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

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

Congrats to STIR student Zainab Agha and Dr. Wisniewski on being awarded the LIVE Microgrant of $2000 at Vanderbilt for the Social Media Simulation project! LIVE microgrants are designed to promote faculty and student research on consequential learning technology to

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

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

Congratulations to our Ph.D. student Mamtaj Akter 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

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

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,

Congratulations to Dr. Jinkyung (Katie) Park on her journal article accepted at the Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 2023 (JFES 2023). How Affordances and Social Norms Shape the Discussion of Harmful Social Media Challenges on Reddit Jinkyung

Congratulations to STIR Lab PhD student Zainab Agha on co-organizing an accepted workshop at CHI titled “Privacy Interventions and Education (PIE): Encouraging Privacy Protective Behavioral Change Online”. Building on the foundational conversations of previous privacy workshops that identify key privacy

Congratulations to STIR Lab undergraduate students Kelsey Miu and Maria Sophia Piper on presenting their research titled “Co-Designing User Personas and a Simulation for Evaluating Adolescent Online Safety Interventions” at the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Fair (VURF), mentored by PhD student

Congratulations to Leena Alghamdi, Mamtaj Akter, Jess Kropczynski, Pamela Wisniewski, and Heather Lipford for getting their paper “Co-designing Community-based Sharing of Smarthome Devices for the Purpose of Co-monitoring In-home Emergencies” accepted at CHI 2023. Co-designing Community-based Sharing of Smarthome Devices

Congratulations to our STIR Lab student Naulsberry Jean Baptiste for successfully defending her Honors Undergraduate Thesis!  Her thesis title is “Teens vs. Tech: Using an Asynchronous Remote Community Environment to Explore Adolescents’ Online Safety Perspectives.” We are very proud of

Congratulations to STIR lab Ph.D. student Ashwaq Alsoubai 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

Congratulations to STIR Lab Ph.D. students Naima Samreen, Sarvech Qadir, and their team on winning the first place prize of $4000 for their Virtual Reality class project titled “Accessibility Quest” in a competition held by Vanderbilt University. Their project aimed

Why is co-managing mobile online safety, security, and privacy among families important but challenging to implement? Dr. Pamela Wisniewski and Mamtaj Akter were invited to the MorningLine show on News Channel 5 to discuss this topic with Nick Beres. Please check out their discussion

Congratulations to STIR lab student Xavier Caddle on passing his Qualifying Review (QR) for Ph.D. in Computer Science this Fall! The Qualifying Review is the first milestone in the Ph.D. program in which the Graduate Committee evaluates the research and

Congratulations to the Senior Design Team for delivering their final presentation on the SafeLINC project. They designed and developed SafeLINC, an innovative mobile app that allows users to manage their mental health by creating safety plans. They presented this application to the

Congratulations to the Senior Design Team for delivering their final presentation on the Carebit project. They designed and developed Carebit v2, an innovative mobile app that allows people to remotely monitor their loved ones’ health information via Fitbit API. This app