Veronica Rivera has joined Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy as an assistant professor working on human-computer interaction, security, and privacy. Her research examines what happens to personal information when artificial intelligence tools enter workplaces and private life.
Rivera was named to the second cohort of the Computing Research Association Trustworthy AI Research Fellowship for Early Career Scholars, announced July 27, 2026. The fellowship is supported by Microsoft. One strand of her fellowship work looks at labor unions that are building AI tools to sort member complaints.
"Unions are developing AI tools to sort through complaints," Rivera said. "Many of these are built with proprietary AI models, which leads us to ask what the risks are of sharing personal information through these tools." She plans a workshop at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems where union leaders and technical experts would build a secure reporting tool together.
A 2026 paper she presented at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security examined what she calls digital whisper networks, informal online communities where platform-based gig workers warn one another about workplace abuse. The study found freelancers avoided formal reporting channels after wage theft, discrimination, health and safety violations, and sexual misconduct.
"There needs to be a way to report this abuse," Rivera said. "But how you do that in a safe and secure way is something we don't yet have answers for."
She is extending the work to chatbots built to imitate a real person's likeness or private details without consent. Rivera holds a PhD in computational media from UC Santa Cruz and teaches a new sociotechnical security course this fall.
Source: Georgia Tech College of Computing - https://www.cc.gatech.edu/news/new-faculty-member-examines-how-ai-shapes-our-most-personal-relationships