"Hey Alexa, what do you know about the COVID-19 vaccine?"- (Mis)perceptions of mass immunization and voice assistants.

In this paper, we analyzed the perceived accuracy of COVID-19 vaccine information spoken back by Amazon Alexa. Unlike social media, Amazon Alexa does not apply soft moderation to unverified content, allowing for use of third-party malicious skills to arbitrarily phrase COVID-19 vaccine information. The results from a 210-participant study suggest that a third-party malicious skill could successful reduce the perceived accuracy among the users of information as to who gets the vaccine first, vaccine testing, and the side effects of the vaccine.

"Alexa, What's a Phishing Email?": Training users to spot phishing emails using a voice assistant.

This paper reports the findings from an empirical study investigating the effectiveness of using intelligent voice assistants, Amazon Alexa in our case, to deliver a phishing training to users. Because intelligent voice assistants can hardly utilize visual cues but provide for convenient interaction with users, we developed an focused on the principles of persuasion with examples on how to look for them in phishing emails. To test the effectiveness of this training, we conducted a between-subject study where 120 participants were randomly assigned in three groups: no training, interaction-based training with Alexa, and a facts-and-advice training and assessed a vignette of 28 emails.

Misinformation warnings: Twitter's soft moderation effects on COVID-19 vaccine belief echoes.

Twitter, prompted by the rapid spread of alternative narratives, started actively warning users about the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. This form of soft moderation comes in two forms: as an interstitial cover before the Tweet is displayed to the user or as a contextual tag displayed below the Tweet. We conducted a 319-participants study with both verified and misleading Tweets covered or tagged with the COVID-19 misinformation warnings to investigate how Twitter users perceive the accuracy of COVID-19 vaccine content on Twitter.

Mitigating active shooter impact: Analysis for policy options based on agent/computer-based modeling.

Unlabelled: Active shooting violence at confined settings, such as educational institutions, poses serious security concerns to public safety. In studying the effects of active shooter scenarios, the common denominator associated with all events, regardless of reason/intent for shooter motives, or type of weapons used, was the location chosen and time expended between the beginning of the event and its culmination. This in turn directly correlates to number of casualties incurred in any given event.