First Child-Centred AI Workshop at CHI

Jun Zhao
Last updated on May 2, 2023

We had our first Child-Centred AI workshop at CHI for the first time on 23 April 2023, in Hamburg.

  • Some background about the workshop

The workshop was movitivated by our observations that there is a lack of understanding about how AI-driven systems used by children operate, and how AI could be designed to better anticipate and respond to children’s diverse requirements. Thus, by situating our inaugural CCAI workshop in a human-computer interaction conference, we aim to bring together acadecmics, designers and practitioners together and explore:

  • How we can extend the current critically constructive dialogue around the meaning of child-centred AI design,
  • How we may operationalise such child-centred AI design in practice,
  • How we may expand and foster a community for those who are interested in designing and developing child-centred AI systems
  • Programme of the workshop

With an organisation committee from a mix of backgrounds (including academics, policy researchers, HCI practitioners, learning scientists), we managed to attract 25 presentations (!), contributed by reserachers from a diverse range of backgrounds.

In addition of a lot discussions related to how AI is used to facilitate learning, how children interact with diferent AI-based system (including thoese at home settings, social media, conversational agents, art, general algorithmic systems), we also have a few presentations exploring novel ways to teach AI to children.

At the same time, we observed a rich exploration of methologies applied to design and assess AI for and with children, with a few papers exploring how to support children thoee with special needs. Researchers have explored designing better AI systems for children in different application contexts, and how to approach PD with children, including some novel interaction methods or prompts, or how to achieve inclusivity.

We are very pleased to see a diverse range of application domains being discussed in the workshop, in addition to learning and education. We are also quite excited by some careful and deep thinking about the role of children in creating CCAI (a key point that we will come back more in the next section). In many ways, this has provided a rich starting point to the approaches and methodologies being applied to create CCAI, and also the plenary and breakout group discussions that we carried out in the second half of the workshop.

We will publish a short report of the workshop and summarise some of the key outcomes from the day. Please look out to this space.