Speaker
Cori Faklaris, Ph.D., University of North Carolina - Charlotte

Abstract
In an era where a single text message can compromise your financial security, why do even the most tech-savvy users fall victim to scams? This talk by Dr. Cori Faklaris explores the hidden psychological and technical gaps in mobile security, drawing on large-scale surveys and interview studies that reveal why college students and trained professionals are vulnerable to "smishing" (SMS phishing). She will introduce the Cybersecurity Anxiety Scale (CybAS), a new tool for measuring the "invisible stress" of digital vigilance, and showcase research on "educational migrants" that leverages AI capabilities and inclusive design to transform user anxiety into agency. Whether you are a student navigating daily digital risks or a researcher building the next generation of defenses, you will learn how we can make cybersecurity less stressful, more intuitive, and deeply grounded in the human experience.

Bio
Dr. Cori Faklaris is a scholar in human-computer interaction at UNC Charlotte, where she directs the Security and Privacy Experiences (SPEX) group. Her focus is on understanding people's needs and designing for safe, secure, and trustworthy computing. In this interdisciplinary work, Faklaris draws on methods from social science, computer science, data science and machine learning, cybersecurity, and design. She also employs skills and knowledge from her past careers in journalism, IT/UX, and social media. She has published research at venues such as the USENIX Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy (SOUPS), the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), and the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI). She has degrees from Carnegie Mellon University (Ph.D. and M.S.), Indiana University (M.S.), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (B.S.). Among other accomplishments, she received a 2024 Google Research Scholar award for work to connect people with advice about their security and privacy concerns. Her work is also funded by BasisLabs LLC founder Carl Hoffman, the U.S. Army Research Lab, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.