Alisa Frik

Biography

Alisa Frik, PhD, is a Research Affiliate and Research Mentor at ICSI and Co-Founder of PrivacyRescue, a user experience research consulting collective. Dr. Frik applies her expertise in social sciences, behavioral and experimental economics, decision-making, behavior change, and choice architecture to investigate privacy and security attitudes, behaviors, expectations, and preferences of regular and underrepresented populations of online users and software developers. 

In her research, Dr. Frik explores how contextual and human factors including trust, heuristics, and biases, and behavioral interventions, such as personalized nudges, affect users’ privacy and security behaviors and decisions. She focuses not only on web and mobile privacy and security, but also on emerging technologies in healthcare, Internet of Things, digital advertising, smart voice assistants, augmented reality, and AI. She is experienced in survey and interview design; online, lab and field experiments; experience sampling; and other mixed methods including quantitative and qualitative analyses. 

Before coming to ICSI, Dr. Frik was a senior user experience researcher in privacy at WhatsApp. She also previously served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Berkeley Laboratory for Usable and Experimental Security (BLUES) at UC Berkeley. She obtained her PhD in Economics at the School of Social Sciences, University of Trento, Italy.

Publications

Selected Honors & Awards

• Norm Hardy Prize for Usable Security, Foresight Institute
• TIM – Telecom Italia Full-Time PhD Scholarship
• Erasmus Mundus MULTIC Program Mobility Scholarship 
• Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity Honorarium
• Center for Technology, Society, and Policy Fellowship

Areas of Expertise

• Usable Security and Privacy by Design
• AI Ethics, Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
• Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design
• User Experience (UX), Usability, and Interface Design
• Collaborative Systems, Social Computing, and CSCW
• Human-AI Interaction and Trust in AI Systems
• Wearable Computing, Ubiquitous, and Pervasive Systems
• AI Ethics, Responsible AI, and Governance of Technology

ICSI Activity