Regan Mandryk (main contact) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her work focuses on how people of all ages use playful technologies for social, cognitive, and emotional wellbeing, how toxicity, discrimination, and harassment thwart the connection and recovery benefits provided by multiplayer games, and how we can design playful collaborative systems that benefit—not harm—player wellbeing. 

Guo Freeman is an Associate Professor of Human-Centered Computing at Clemson University, USA. Her work focuses on how interactive technologies such as multiplayer online games, live streaming, social VR, and generative AI shape interpersonal relationships and group behaviour; and how to design safe, inclusive, and supportive social VR spaces to combat harassment risks especially for marginalized users.

Julian Frommel is an Assistant Professor in Interaction / Multimedia at Utrecht University. He is interested in the design and implementation of interactive digital systems that provide enjoyable, meaningful, safe, and healthy experiences for users, including research on how to mitigate the negative effects of toxicity and harassment in online games and other online spaces.

Jan Gugenheimer is an Assistant Professor at TU-Darmstadt and Telecom-Paris, working on HCI-related topics in the field of Extended Reality. His focus is on understanding how new unique properties of immersive technologies can be used to deceive and manipulate a user's actions and beliefs and how we have to design the technology to prevent such potential misuse. 

Cliff Lampe is a Professor and Associate Dean in the University of Michigan School of Information. His work examines how the design of systems shape and are shaped by social processes like harassment, toxicity and extremism. That work has been focused on social media and collaborative creation sites.

Lingyuan Li is a User Experience Researcher at Meta, where she guides product teams in creating seamless and trustworthy commerce interactions, emphasizing transparency and reliable user experiences. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information. Her research examined mediated experiences and explored how AI can mitigate emergent personal harms and risks to support the design of more inclusive, safer, and supportive online spaces.

Michel Wijkstra is a PhD candidate in Interaction/Multimedia at Utrecht University. His work explores toxic behaviours (i.e., harassment and cyberbullying) in online games and how intervention systems can help control and mitigate such behaviours. He has a specific interest in preventative systems that help manage precursors of problematic behaviour—for example, by controlling frustration and supporting emotion regulation.

Douglas Zytko is an Associate Professor in the College of Innovation & Technology at the University of Michigan-Flint. His research uses consent as a lens to understand and design mitigative solutions for sexual harm. Most relevant to this workshop, his work explores data donation of online dating sexual experiences as a human-centered approach to improving sexual risk detection AI.