SEPTEMBER 11, 2026
Briana Vecchione, PhD
Technical Researcher
AI on the Ground
Data & Society
Livia Garofalo, PhD
Researcher
Health & Data/Trustworthy Infrastructures
Data & Society
About the Presentation:
About the Presenters: Briana Vecchione is a technical researcher with the AI on the Ground program, conducting research on sociotechnical auditing and accountability in algorithmic systems, with a recent focus on large language models (LLMs) for social and emotional support. Her work examines how people live with and make sense of AI-mediated support, tracing how chatbot interactions shape expectations of care, forms of meaning-making, and practical help-seeking in everyday life. Her current research explores how LLM-based systems behave in emotionally vulnerable contexts, including how users interpret and act on what these systems provide, how safety boundaries are communicated or blurred, and how product incentives and design choices influence the experience of support. Her broader research agenda advances sociotechnical auditing methods for algorithmic systems — spanning measurement, evaluation design, and audit tooling in real-world governance settings — while connecting empirical findings to accountability frameworks for policy, organizational oversight, and public interest evaluation.
Briana holds a PhD in information science from Cornell University, and her work has been published in venues including Communications of the ACM, ACM CHI, and ACM FAccT, where her team received a Best Paper Award. Her research has been supported by Google, Meta, Microsoft, the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Notre Dame–IBM Tech Ethics Lab.
A cultural and medical anthropologist, Livia Garofalo is a researcher with Data & Society’s Trustworthy Infrastructures program, where she focuses on the materialities and intimacies of technologies and infrastructures. She is interested in understanding how people experience and make meaning in times of crisis, how technology and AI are mobilized, and how power and subjectivity show up in everyday life. Her recent projects have examined historical and economic trauma and the delivery of critical care in Argentina; the intersection of labor, technology in psychotherapy; AI and mental health; and the community impacts of data centers in Pennsylvania. She is also currently an institutional partner of the NSF-Brown University’s AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (ARIA). Livia earned her PhD in anthropology and a master’s in public health from Northwestern University. Her work has been funded by funded by the US Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in cultural anthropology from the University of Bologna, Italy.