About 

Email: [email protected]

I am a privacy researcher specializing in the ethical and societal impacts of emerging AI technologies, with a particular focus on emotion AI. My work critically examines how emotion AI technologies interpreting and interacting with human emotions challenge current understandings of privacy, ethics, and agency. As AI increasingly permeates social, professional, and healthcare contexts, these technologies raise complex questions about the boundaries of our emotional privacy and what it means to maintain human dignity in a data-driven world. 

Bridging empirical studies with philosophical analysis, I shed light on how emotion AI reshapes power dynamics, influences human capacities for agency, and can amplify existing social inequalities. My research uncovers the ethical boundaries of AI-enabled information flows to advance privacy theory and inform responsible policy-making. Ultimately, I seek to establish guiding principles, actionable frameworks, and socio-technical standards that support the ethical integration of AI into society, ensuring that technological advancement respects and enhances human capabilities rather than undermining them.

Dissertation title

Reshaping Privacy Norms in the Age of Emotion AI: Socio-Technical Pathways for Emotional Privacy, Human Agency, and Dignity

Dissertation abstract

My dissertation investigates the emerging ethical and privacy challenges posed by emotion AI -- technologies designed to infer and respond to human emotions. At the heart of this work is the concept of emotional privacy, which emphasizes the need to protect individuals' inner emotional lives from unprecedented invasions made possible by AI-driven inferences and interactions. Using empirical studies and philosophical analysis, I explore how emotion AI’s informational flows affect individual and collective agency, create power imbalances, and introduce new forms of social stratification. 



My work reveals limitations in dominant privacy frameworks in addressing emotional privacy concerns, especially in contexts like mental healthcare and the workplace where socio-technical vulnerabilities are most acute. To address these challenges, my dissertation proposes an updated privacy framework that combines contextual integrity with the capabilities approach. This integrated framework establishes thresholds for ethically justifiable uses of emotion AI and offers a pathway for determining when and what technical and policy interventions are warranted. Ultimately, my work aims to inform privacy theory and technology policy, identifying conditions under which emotion AI might be ethically deployed with basic respect for individuals’ emotional privacy, agency, and dignity.

Fields of interest

Privacy and Security; Human Computer Interaction (HCI); Science, Technology, and Society; Critical Studies of Design and Computing

Education

BA in Philosophy and BA in English (with distinction), Southern Methodist University, 2011

PhD in Information, University of Michigan, 2025

Personal website

CV

Selected publications

Peer-reviewed publications

Cassidy Pyle, Kat Roemmich, and Nazanin Andalibi. 2024. U.S. Job-Seekers’ Organizational Justice Perceptions of Emotion AI-Enabled Interviews. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW2,

Article 454 (November 2024), 36 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3686993

Kat Roemmich, Shanley Corvite, Cassidy Pyle, Nadia Karizat, and Nazanin Andalibi. 2024. Emotion AI Use in U.S. Mental Healthcare: Potentially Unjust and Techno-Solutionist. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW1, Article 47 (April 2024), 46 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637324 

http://kroemmich.github.io/files/CSCW24_Emotion_AI_Mental_Health.pdf 

Kat Roemmich, Florian Schaub, and Nazanin Andalibi. 2023. Emotion AI at Work: Implications for Workplace Surveillance, Emotional Labor, and Emotional Privacy. In CHI ’23: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 23–28, 2023,Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580950 http://kroemmich.github.io/files/CHI23_Emotion_AI_at_Work.pdf

Kat Roemmich, Tillie Rosenberg, Serena Fan, and Nazanin Andalibi. 2023. Values in Emotion Artificial Intelligence Hiring Services: Technosolutions to Organizational Problems. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW1, Article 109 (April 2023), 28 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579543 http://kroemmich.github.io/files/CSCW23_Values_in_EAI_Hiring_Services.pdf

Shanley Corvite*, Kat Roemmich*, Tillie Rosenberg, and Nazanin Andalibi. 2023. Data Subjects’ Perspectives on Emotion Artificial Intelligence Use in the Workplace: A Relational Ethics Lens. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW1, Article 124 (April 2023), 38 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579600. *Co-first authors contributed equally.

Df (Received Best Paper Award, top 1%)

Kat Roemmich and Nazanin Andalibi. 2021. Data Subjects’ Conceptualizations of and Attitudes Toward Automatic Emotion Recognition-Enabled Wellbeing Interventions on Social Media. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW2, Article 308 (October 2021), 34 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476049 

http://kroemmich.github.io/files/3476049-a.pdf 

(Received Honorable Mention for Best Paper Award, top 5%)

Lightly reviewed publications

Abraham Mhaidli* and Kat Roemmich*. 2024. Overworking in HCI: A Reflection on Why We Are Burned Out, Stressed, and Out of Control; and What We Can Do About It. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '24), May 11-16, 2024. Honolulu, HI, USA. 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3644052 *Co-first authors contributed equally

http://kroemmich.github.io/files/CHI24_altCHI_Overwork.pdf

In the news

De Pressigny, C. 2023. The creepy AI-driven surveillance that may be infiltrating your workplace. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-surveillance-detects-emotion-at-work-gets-you-fired-2023-11