News
Stay up to date with the latest from CySafe Lab — including new publications, awards, research grants, and other milestones from our team.
2026
- Happy to share that our paper entitled “Expectation, Backlash, Recovery, and Excitement: How Model Releases Shape Reddit Perceptions of Conversational AI Systems,” has been accepted at EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference)! 🎉 Huge congratulations to Vahid Rahimzadeh for leading the effort and for getting his first PhD paper accepted at a top NLP venue! Many thanks also to Yury Zhauniarovich for being an amazing co-supervisor and collaborator!
- Happy to share that our paper entitled “AudiTok: A System for Cross-Country Audits of TikTok’s Mobile App” has been accepted at ICWSM 2027! 🎉 Congratulations to Moonis for leading the effort!
- 🏆 We are thrilled to share that our PI, Savvas Zannettou, has been awarded the prestigious Adamic-Glance Distinguished Early Career Award 2026 at AAAI ICWSM 2026! This annual award recognizes a researcher who has distinguished themselves through creativity and rigor in addressing computational social science research topics of major societal impact — a tremendous honor for the lab and our collaborators.
- 🏆 Our paper 'The Great Data Standoff: Researchers vs. Platforms Under the Digital Services Act' received a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at AAAI ICWSM 2026. Congratulations to Catalina and Thales for leading the efforts!
- 🏆 Our paper 'Gold Standard or Gold-Plated? Human Practices of Triple Verification in CSAM Takedown' received an Honorable Mention Award at ACM CHI 2026. Congratulations to the first author, Melissa!
- 📰 Three papers accepted at The Web Conference 2026: 1) Does Ad-Free Mean Less Data Collection? An Empirical Study of Platform Data Practices and User Expectations; 2) Bowling with ChatGPT: On the Evolving User Interactions with Conversational AI Systems; 3) The Algorithmic Self-Portrait: Deconstructing Memory in ChatGPT. Congratulations to Sepehr, Keerthana, Qinwuan, and Elisabeth for leading the efforts!
- 📰 Our paper 'Gold Standard or Gold-Plated? Human Practices of Triple Verification in CSAM Takedown' has been accepted at ACM CHI 2026. Congratulations to Melissa for the amazing work!
2025
- 📰 Our paper 'The Great Data Standoff: Researchers vs. Platforms Under the Digital Services Act' has been accepted at ICWSM 2026! Congratulations to Catalina and Thales for leading the effort!
- 📰 Our paper 'Setting the Course, but Forgetting to Steer: Analyzing Compliance with GDPR's Right of Access to Data by Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube' has been accepted at IEEE S&P 2026! Congratulations to Keerthana and Abhishek for leading the effort!
- 📰 Our paper 'Breaking Agents: Compromising Autonomous LLM Agents Through Malfunction Amplification' has been accepted at EMNLP 2025! Congratulations to Boyang for leading the effort!
- 📰 Our paper 'Hate in Plain Sight: On the Risks of Moderating AI-Generated Hateful Illusions' has been accepted at ICCV 2025! Congratulations to Yiting for leading the effort!
- 📰 Two papers accepted at AAAI ICWSM 2025! Congratulations to Aoyu and Daniel for leading the works!
- 📰 Two papers accepted at Usenix Security 2025! Congratulations to Xinyue and Yihan!
2024
- 💰 Received a research grant from NWO (1.3M euros) for a 5-year project to study trusted flaggers under the DSA framework, together with Carlos Ganan, Frederik Borgesius, and Pieter Wolters.
- 💰 Received an unrestricted gift of $100K from Google's Academic Research Award Program, together with Rolf van Wegberg.
- 🏆 Our paper 'Auditing Algorithmic Explanations of Social Media Feeds: A Case Study of TikTok Video Explanations' won the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at AAAI ICWSM 2024! Congratulations Sep!
- 📰 Three papers accepted at AAAI ICWSM 2024! Congratulations to Moonis, Sepehr, and Josemi for their hard work!
- 📰 Two papers accepted at The Web Conference 2024, focusing on news exposure via data donations and personalization on TikTok. Congratulations to Salim and Karan for leading the efforts!
- 📰 Our paper studying user engagement on TikTok using data donations has been accepted at CHI 2024.
2023
- 📰 Three papers accepted at AAAI ICWSM 2024, focusing on information dissemination and attacks on messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. Congratulations to Mohamad, Daniel, and Philipe for leading the efforts!
- 📰 Paper on using LLMs for detecting and mitigating toxic content via prompt tuning accepted at IEEE S&P 2024.
- 📰 Paper studying the generation of unsafe images from Text-to-Image models accepted at ACM CCS 2023. Congratulations to Yiting, Xinyue, and Xinlei!
- 📰 Paper investigating QAnon on Telegram accepted at WebSci 2023. Congratulations Mohamad!
2022
- 📰 Two papers accepted at IEEE S&P 2023, studying hateful meme evolution and soft moderation on Twitter. Congratulations to Yiting and Pujan!
- 📰 Paper 'Non-Polar Opposites: Analyzing the Relationship Between Echo Chambers and Hostile Intergroup Interactions on Reddit' accepted at AAAI ICWSM 2023. Congratulations Alexandros!
- 🏆 Paper on Measuring and Triggering Toxic Behavior in Open-Domain Chatbots received a Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM CCS 2022.
- 📰 Paper studying the generation of toxic language from open-domain chatbots accepted at ACM CCS 2022.
- 📰 Two papers accepted at ICWSM 2023, results of summer internships at MPI-INF. Congratulations Cici and Felipe!