Portrait of Shiza Ali

Shiza Ali

Human-Centered AI | Usable Security | Online Safety | Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS)

I am a Postdoctoral Associate at TRAILS, the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society. My research combines human factors, AI, security, and policy to study online trust, risk, and measurement integrity. I study how scams, fraud, unsafe interactions, and coordinated abuse appear in real platform data, and how to measure these harms reliably for research, platform governance, and AI evaluation. I earned my PhD from Boston University, where I was part of the Security Lab (SeclaBU) and collaborated with iDrama Lab and STIR Lab on measuring and detecting online harms across social media, including youth exploitation, disinformation, and coordinated abuse. Read more about my research here.

My work has been published in top-tier venues including ACM CHI, CSCW, and IEEE S&P and has been reported by WIRED.

News

  • 2026 News
    • good news (June 2026) One new paper accepted at SOUPS'26: Shiza Ali, Wellington Esposito Barbosa, Matthias Fassl, Aditi Ganapathi, Jaron Mink, and Adam J. Aviv. "SoK: Mapping Threats to Defenses in Online Survey Fraud." Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS'26), August 2026.
    • good news (January 2026) Joined The Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) as a Research Scientist.
  • 2025 News
    • good news (September 2025) Won the People's Choice Award for my research talk at GWU Postdoc Research Symposium.
    • good news (August 2025) Joined GWUSEC Lab with Dr. Adam Aviv at GW as a Postdoc.
    • good news (August 2025) Paper accepted at EPJ Data Science
  • 2024 News
    • good news (August 2024) Started a postdoctoral position at the University of Washington.
    • good news (May 2024) Defended my PhD thesis at Boston University.
  • 2023 News
    • good news (December 2023) Gave a talk on "Tackling Malicious Activity Online" at the University of Iowa.
    • good news (November 2023) Received the "Rising Star in Social Computing and Tech Policy" award from the University of Iowa.
    • good news (October 2023) Our paper "Sliding into My DMs" received the Impact Recognition Award.
    • good news (August 2023) Received the SIGCHI Gary Marsden Travel Award.
    • good news (May 2023) Named a finalist for Meta's Research PhD Fellowship.
    • good news (April 2023) Our papers "Getting Meta" and "Sliding into My DMs" were accepted to CSCW 2023.
  • 2022 News
    • good news (August 2022) My paper "Understanding the Digital Lives of Youth" received an Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2022.
    • good news (April 2022) Our paper "Understanding the Digital Lives of Youth" was accepted to CHI 2022.

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