Keynote Speakers
Earth, as seen by Voyager 1
from 6 billion km away (1990).
M. Angela Sasse
Professor of Human-Centred Security - Emeritus Professor, University College London
Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
“Usable, Human-Centred, Socio-Technical Security: What Is the Difference?”
This talk will provide a personal review of 30 years of researching how human behaviour in security, and our community’s efforts to develop effective solutions to protect individuals, organisations and societies from increasing numbers of attacks.
Usable security focused on functionality and aesthetics of expert-designed solutions; human-centred security put human needs and preferences at the centre of design. The STS perspective offers a different view of the processes involved in security — and I will argue that re-conceptualising security in terms of care, maintenance and tinkering can help organisations.
M. Angela Sasse is the Professor of Human-Centred Security at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, and Emeritus Professor at University College London, UK. An HCI researcher by training, she is a pioneer of usable security research and field studies on security in organisations. She was the Founding Director of the Research Centre on Socio-Technical Security (RISCS) from 2012–2017. Since 2018 she is at Ruhr University Bochum, where she is a speaker of the Exzellenzcluster CASA.
She is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering and the German National Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina”.
Marinella Petrocchi
Senior Researcher, IIT-CNR Pisa - Visiting Researcher, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
National Research Council of Italy
“Simulating Personality-Driven News Judgement with Large Language Models”
Large language models are increasingly used to simulate human decision-making. In this talk, I examine whether personality-aligned LLM “agents”, endowed with Big-Five profiles, can reproduce human differences in news judgement — the ability to rate true news as accurate and false news as inaccurate. Using existing datasets where human participants with known personality traits evaluated political headlines, we create matching LLM agents and compare their responses with human patterns.
I will present where trait effects (e.g., Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Open-Mindedness) are echoed by LLMs, where they diverge, and how personality conditioning changes overall accuracy ratings across different prompt formats and model settings. This offers a cautious view of what current LLMs can and cannot tell us about personality-driven susceptibility to misinformation.
Marinella Petrocchi is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council (IIT-CNR) in Pisa and a Visiting Researcher at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy. Her research focuses on disinformation detection and information quality assessment. She studies novel techniques for detecting fake news and fake accounts online, as well as automated methods for ranking the reputability of online news media.
She is the author of several international publications on these topics and often gives talks and lectures on the subject.