2025 Research Speaker Series
Dr. Emily Tseng
Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Microsoft Research
Incoming HCDE Assistant Professor (2026)
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9
4:30 – 5:20 p.m.
Sieg Building, room 134
Participation and Expertise in Designing Digital Safety
View recording (UW NetID login required)
The digital safety problems of today and tomorrow ask a lot of our research infrastructures. As computing technologies become 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 harm survivors and the vicarious trauma of researchers — and provide the rigorous science we need to create positive real-world impact?
This talk will cover my past, present and future work exploring these questions in the contexts of tech-facilitated intimate partner violence and socioemotional uses of AI. I’ll conclude with future directions for allied research communities across computer science, HCI, and responsible AI, towards research infrastructures that help us safely ensure safety for us all.
About the presenter
Emily's 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 build the sociotechnical infrastructures we need to make digital technology safer for everyone. Her current research interests include the psychological effects of participatory AI, building open LLM toolkits with and for journalists, and how socioemotional uses of AI create new types of interpersonal harms.
Emily publishes at top-tier venues in human-computer interaction (ACM CHI, CSCW) and computer security and privacy (USENIX Security, Oakland). 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. Currently a postdoctoral research scientist at Microsoft Research with the Social Media Collective, she will soon join the faculty of the University of Washington in Human-Centered Design and Engineering.
The HCDE Research Speaker Series is hosted Thursdays in Autumn Quarter by the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Presentations are open to the public.