Recent News

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

Congratulations to Dr. Pamela Wisniewski for getting featured by the Vanderbilt School of Engineering. Dr. Wisniewski shared some effective strategies for parents to limit their children’s screen time during the holidays. Check out this link to learn about those strategies:

Congratulations to STIR Lab Ph.D. student Xavier Caddle on getting his first dissertation paper “Duty to Respond: The Challenges Social Service Providers Face When Charged With Keeping Youth Safe Online” accepted at GROUP 2023. In this work, Caddle collaborated with

Congratulations to Zainab Agha, Dr. Karla Badillo-Urquiola, and Dr. Pamela Wisniewski for getting their paper “Strike at the Root: Co-designing Real-Time Social Media Interventions for Adolescent Online Risk Prevention” accepted at CSCW 2023. Strike at the Root: Co-designing Real-Time Social

Congratulations to the STIR Lab researchers and the collaborators on getting two full papers, one poster, and three demos accepted at CSCW 2022. From Parental Control to Joint Family Oversight: Can Parents and Teens Manage Mobile Online Safety and Privacy

Congratulation to STIR Lab Ph.D. student Neeraj Chatlani for leading a week-long camp connect program at the UCF. Through this program, Orlando school children engage in UX/UI design and research with some hands-on exercises that were led by Neeraj and

Congratulations to Dr. Drishti Sharma, Dr. Krista Mehari, Dr. Jennifer Doty, Dr. Nandini Sharma, and Dr. Pamela Wisniewski for getting their new book published titled “Cyberbullying and Digital Safety”. The digital version of this book is available at this link:

Congratulations to STIR Lab undergraduate student, Zachary Miller, for presenting his research work at the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Showcase. His poster titled “Evaluating Usability: Mobile Collaborative Safety Planning for Youth Suicide Prevention” was mentored by the STIR Lab

Congratulations to Dr. Pamela Wisniewski for being invited to serve on the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) leadership council. The mission of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC, https://cra.org/ccc/) is to enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact computing research

Congratulations to Dr. Pamela Wisniewski for serving as a Senior Technical Expert for Terre des Homes Netherlands’ report on “Child safety by design that works against online sexual exploitation of children.” To check out the full report, please click here.

The Office of Diversity and Inclusion selects Dr. Pamela Wisniewski to serve as theDiversity and Inclusion Ambassador for the College of Engineering & Computer Science.  

Congratulations to STIR Lab undergraduate student Camila Acevedo Carrillo for receiving the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship. She is featured on the University of Central Florida Colleges & Campus webpage.

Dr. Pamela Wisniewski was invited to the University of Waterloo to present her research work on Promoting Adolescent Online Safety and Privacy through Human-Centered Computing.  

Congratulations to Dr. Karla Badillo for being featured on the UCF Student Life. She is going to join the University of Notre Dame as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track).

Dr. Pamela Wisniewski participated in a CHI 2022 panel with Dr. Douglas Zytco, Dr. Shion Guha, Dr. Eric Baumer, and Dr. Min Kyung Lee to discuss how participatory design can be applied to AI systems. Participatory Design of AI Systems:

Congratulations to Ashwaq Alsoubai and her MOSafely Senior Design group for being nominated as Semi-Finalist out of 118 Senior Design projects. They created a social media risk detection dashboard that provides users risk assessments of their social media conversations.

Congratulations to Dr. Pamela Wisniewski, Ashwaq Alsoubai, Dr. Afsaneh Razi, and Xavier Caddle who presented at the CRASSH Webinar: Children and Artificial Intelligence: risks, opportunities and the future at the University of Cambridge. The title of the presentation was “Youth

Congratulations to the STIR Lab undergrad student Ritesh Chandrasekaran for successfully defending his Honors Undergraduate Thesis in Biomedical Sciences. His thesis title is “Differential Workload Levels using Primary and Secondary Tasks in VR.”