Today’s digital safety problems ask a lot of our research infrastructures. As computing becomes more social and more complex, so too do the vulnerabilities and exploits that attackers use to sow harm. We need to learn about technology’s role in harm to develop mitigations. But deep, empathetic, and nuanced research into these experiences asks survivors to repeatedly relive one of the worst moments of their lives, and asks researchers to repeatedly consider volumes and volumes of others’ pain and suffering. How do we learn about these experiences in ways that respect the dignity of survivors and the vicarious trauma of researchers, and still provide the rigorous science we need to create positive real-world impact?
In this talk, I’ll draw on my work on technology’s role in intimate partner violence to spotlight substantive and methodological challenges in digital safety research today. I’ll describe how abusers use technology to stalk, harass, and surveil their victims, and the vital role of frontline computer security clinics. I’ll then show how participatory data stewardship and trauma-informed research design can reduce the burdens of this work on survivors and on researchers. Finally, I’ll turn to the growing phenomenon of people seeking relationship advice from chatbots, and how it poses new challenges for AI safeguarding approaches like red-teaming. Throughout, I’ll ask whose participation and expertise digital safety relies on, what we owe them, and what this means for a science of safety. I’ll conclude with directions for allied research communities across computer science, HCI, and responsible AI, towards what I call sociotechnical safety.
| 11:45am - 12:15pm: | Food and community socializing. |
| 12:15pm - 1:15pm: | Presentation with Q&A. Available hybrid via Zoom. |
| 1:30pm - 2:15pm: | Student meeting with speaker, held in the same location. |
Emily Tseng is an Assistant Professor at UW HCDE, where she runs the Sociotechnical Safety Lab. Her research examines how computing comes to mediate harm, how to intervene, and what it means to do so. Trained as a scientist-advocate for survivors of gender-based violence, she works across interpersonal, organizational, and societal levels of harm to make digital technology safer for everyone. Her group’s current research interests include digital safety in diaspora communities, building secure and private LLMs with and for journalists, and how AI mediation sets norms for care and harm in interpersonal relationships. Emily publishes at top-tier venues in human-computer interaction (ACM CHI, CSCW), computer security and privacy (USENIX Security, Oakland), and responsible AI (ACM FAccT). With her collaborators, she has earned several Best Paper distinctions and an Internet Defense Prize, third place. Emily earned her BA at Princeton University and her PhD at Cornell Information Science, and completed a postdoc at Microsoft Research with the Social Media Collective before joining the faculty at UW. She’s excited to get to know Seattle and the DUB community – and already loves women’s basketball, coffee, and a bicycle commute.