Colloquium series: Veronica Rivera, “Digital safety beyond the platform”

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.

About Veronica Rivera

Veronica Rivera is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science department at Stanford University, where she is advised by Zakir Durumeric and works with the Institute for Human-Centered AI, the Center for Ethics in Society, and the Empirical Security Research Group. 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 abuse, that occur across user groups, platforms, and in physical spaces. Previously she received a PhD in Computational Media from UC Santa Cruz, where she was advised by David Lee, and she was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, where she was advised by Elissa Redmiles. She has a B.S. in Computer Science and Math from Harvey Mudd College.

Registration

This lecture is open to the public. No registration is required, but space is limited.