As digital technologies become embedded in nearly every aspect of daily life, the need for human-centered approaches to privacy, safety, and digital well-being has never been more urgent. At ICSI, the Socio-Technical Interaction Research (STIR) Group, led by Principal Research Scientist Pamela Wisniewski, PhD, is advancing a bold vision for safer and more empowering digital ecosystems, especially for youth and other vulnerable users.

Dr. Wisniewski’s work sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction, social computing, privacy, and online safety. As founder and director of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab (The STIR Group) and Teenovate, she has spent her career challenging fear-based and restriction-centered approaches to online safety. Instead, her research asks how technology can better support resilience, autonomy, trust, and shared responsibility among teens, families, platforms, educators, policymakers, and communities. The group’s mission is both timely and ambitious: to understand how digital systems shape people’s lives, identify where harms emerge, and design socio-technical interventions that empower users rather than simply monitor or control them. 

Discovery to Action: A Decade of Impact

Dr. Wisniewski and her research group have helped redefine the field of adolescent online safety. Their work has shown that protecting young people online is not simply a matter of surveillance or restriction. It is a matter of teaching skills, designing better systems, supporting healthy relationships, and creating tools that respect teens’ developmental need for independence.

1. Launching a New Research Group at ICSI

Dr. Pamela Wisniewski is ICSI’s newest Principal Research Scientist, having joined in October 2025 to lead the Socio-Technical Interaction Research Group. Her group focuses on how digital technologies affect the safety, privacy, security, and well-being of vulnerable populations. Its research spans co-designed online safety strategies for teens, privacy-preserving and context-aware algorithms for detecting online risks, AI tools that empower adolescents, and community-based approaches to reducing digital inequality.

Her research reflects ICSI’s broader commitment to interdisciplinary research with real-world impact. By combining computer science, social science, human-centered design, and public-interest technology, the STIR Group is helping shape a digital future that is not only technically advanced, but socially responsible.

2. Redefining Youth Online Safety

A defining contribution of Dr. Wisniewski’s research has been her resilience-based approach to adolescent online safety. Rather than framing teens primarily as passive users who must be shielded from all online risks, her work recognizes them as developing individuals who need support, agency, and opportunities to build digital safety skills.

This approach was powerfully captured in the influential paper “Parental Control vs. Teen Self-Regulation: Is There a Middle Ground for Mobile Online Safety?” The study examined 75 Android mobile apps designed to support adolescent online safety and found that the vast majority of features emphasized parental control, while far fewer supported teen self-regulation. In response, Dr. Wisniewski and her co-authors introduced the Teen Online Safety Strategies framework, which called for a more balanced model that pairs parental guidance with adolescent autonomy. In 2026, this work received the USEC Test of Time Award, recognizing its enduring influence on research and design.

3. Advancing Policy and Public-Interest Technology

Dr. Wisniewski’s research has reached far beyond academia. Her work on adolescent online safety has been recognized nationally and internationally, including by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the Netherlands’ Down to Zero Alliance on combating online sexual exploitation of children, and the White House Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety.

In 2024, she was appointed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group, where she contributed human-centered computing expertise to conversations about the future of complex socio-technical systems. She recently served as a nonresident fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology, joining a cohort of experts working to advance civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age, and is a nonresident fellow with UC Berkeley’s Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG), an interdisciplinary community focused on accountability, fairness, and responsible technology. These roles reflect the growing importance of socio-technical research in shaping policy, governance, and responsible innovation. 

4. Holding Platforms Accountable

Recent work from Dr. Wisniewski and the STIR Group continues to examine how major technology platforms communicate and implement online safety. One recent project titled “Analyzing Social Media Claims regarding Youth Online Safety Features to Identify Problem Areas and Communication Gaps” analyzed hundreds of safety-related communications from platforms popular among youth, identifying how companies describe safety features, where gaps remain, and how communication practices can obscure whether safety tools are consistently available, effective, or understandable to users.

This work is especially important as youth online safety becomes a major focus of public debate, regulation, and platform design. The group’s approach brings nuance to these conversations. Rather than asking only whether platforms have safety features, the research asks whether those features are transparent, evidence-based, context-aware, developmentally appropriate, and designed around the needs of teens and families.

5. Growing the Next Generation

A central part of Dr. Wisniewski’s impact is mentorship. Across institutions and through the STIR Group, she has trained students and researchers who are now contributing to human-computer interaction, trust and safety, privacy, social computing, and public-interest technology.

Recent milestones include students completing doctoral degrees, postdoctoral scholars moving into tenure-track faculty positions, and lab members contributing to public scholarship on online safety and digital well-being. By creating structures for young people to contribute directly to online safety research, Dr. Wisniewski and her team model the participatory, respectful, and empowering approach that their research advocates.

The group’s recent publications show how much of this work is student- and trainee-driven, with many papers led by students and early-career collaborators. Through this model, the STIR Group is building more than a research portfolio; it is building a pipeline of scholars, designers, and practitioners prepared to address online safety as an interdisciplinary, community-engaged challenge.

Looking Ahead: Designing for Resilience, Agency, and Accountability

The STIR Group’s work shows that the most effective online safety solutions are not built through fear, surveillance, or one-size-fits-all controls. With their most recent work, “Decentralized Governance for Youth Online Safety,” the group explores institutional mechanisms for user protection in the context of democratic principles and presents a vision for rethinking governance as a collaborative, infrastructure-level responsibility.

This story was published in August 2026 as part of a retrospective series highlighting ICSI’s accomplishments and impacts over the years. To learn about our ongoing work, explore our Core Research Themes.