ICSA Colloquium Talk - Tuesday, 4th November @ 11am

Title: Digital Safety Beyond the Platform

Abstract: Technology increasingly connects our digital and physical worlds in both good and bad ways; social media sites, messaging platforms, and matching algorithms facilitate greater social connection, but also facilitate harms that bridge into the physical world. Existing technical protections against digital harms fail to address offline harms caused by digital systems. How can we enjoy the benefits of these systems while reducing the harm? In this talk, I present three projects that show how I combine techniques from computer security and human-computer interaction (HCI) to make technology safer, through: (1) single-platform defenses, (2) multi-platform defenses, and (3) post-harm mitigations. Looking ahead, my work suggests new directions that can expand the scope and impact of computer security and HCI research.

Bio: Veronica Rivera is an incoming assistant professor at Georgia Tech in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy. In her research, she combines approaches from Computer Security and Human-Computer Interaction to design technical protections against digital harms, like hate, harassment, and physical and financial abuse, that occur across user groups, platforms, and in physical spaces. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University in the Computer Science department, where she also taught ethics across the entire Computer Science curriculum. Veronica received her PhD in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Math from Harvey Mudd College.