Research
My academic work aims to understand and prevent new crime threats related to technological innovations.
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During my PhD, I focused on why people fall for online scams. Through psychological experiments and user studies, I developed an adversarial training method and novel e-mail features that improve people's ability to detect phishing attacks.
Currently, as a Research Fellow in the Dawes Centre for Future Crime at University College London (UCL), I research future crime and security risks related to emerging technologies. Recent projects concern social robots, climate change mitigation tools, and brain-computer interfaces. By working with industry leaders and policymakers, we help shape a safer future.
Journal articles
Sarah Zheng, Liron Rozenkrantz and Tali Sharot. 2024. Poor lie detection related to under-reliance on statistics and overreliance on own behaviour. Communications Psychology.
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Valentina Vellani, Sarah Zheng, Dilay Ercelik and Tali Sharot. 2023. The illusory truth effect leads to the spread of misinformation. Cognition.​
Doctoral thesis
Sarah Zheng. 2024. Online scam detection using human psychology: Toward usable cybersecurity. Access via ProQuest.
Conference papers
Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker. 2023. Phishing to improve detection. In The European Symposium on Usable Security.
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Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker. 2023. Checking, nudging or scoring? Evaluating e-mail user security tools. In Nineteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.
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Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker. 2022. Presenting suspicious details in User-Facing e-mail headers does not improve phishing detection. In Eighteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.
