The Year of 2025

Jun Zhao
Last updated on Jan 5, 2026 5 min read

While we are beginning 2026, we must reflect how 2025 has been a brilliant year for child-centred AI research in Oxford.

We could not have achieved this without the wonderful team and our wonderful collaborators from differnt parts of the world.

CHAILD in full swing

CHAILD is one of the flagship cross-disciplinary research projects funded by the UKRI and was officially kicked off in February 2025. We are very pleased that by July 2025, we have assembled a strong full team with the support of our colleagues in Oxford and UCL. We welcome the joining of:

  • Dr Isobel Vosey: who has extensive experience of working with children and designing child-centred robotics technologies
  • Dr Vidminas Vizgirda: who is jointly appointed by Oxford Computer Science and UCL Knowledge Lab
  • Zaki Pauzi, who is starting a full-time position with UCL from January 2026 moving from his part-time basis at CHAILD
  • Dr Leslye Dias Duran, who is our full-time Philosopher, joining us from Ruhr-Universität Bochum

We are fortunatue to also have the continued support of Dr Sarah Turner from UCL, who has been recently awarded the prestigious British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to “investigate young people’s entanglements with generative AI and its implications for AI literacy". We have no doubt that Sarah will bring incredibly valuable addition to the project with her thoughtful approach to this crucial research programme.

While setting up the team, we have made exciting progress with our research programme, including

  • Completed a literature view on designing agency for children
  • Designed, implemented and launched a generative AI study with children and young people
  • Received the MPLS Policy Fellowship for Isobel and Vid
  • Secured a CHAILD workshop at CHI 2026: https://oxfordhcc.github.io/CAMCAD/.
  • Accepted for presentations at the Oxford MPLS AI & Ethics conference and one at the AIEOU conference
  • Received 40 young people visiting Trinity College in December, with strong, positive feedback and follow-ups
  • Established an amazing reading group meeting series to bring together our interdisciplinary research team strongly and closely, and to learn from each other’s valuable research method and principles.

In 2026, we are looking forward to some exciting co-design activities with children and young people. To provide better support for their agency while interacting with generative AI models, we will also deepen our research of current generative AI models and further progress our work on creating child-centred AI benchmarking metrics.

Learn more about our work at chaild.org.

Ethical Design in full swing

2025 also marks the start of the Ethical Design programme, funded by the Oxford University Impact Acceleration Grant and UKRI Innovate UK, with the support of Oxford Reuben College’s Generation AI programme.

This innovative initiative aimed to bridge the gap between academic research and practical applications of conducting ethical designs when creating AI systems for children. We are thrilled to share some of the amazing progresses we have made in 2025:

  • Designed and piloted our curriculum for designing for children’s agency with the Winning Team of Elevate Great’s Inaugural AI Competition
  • Delivered our Ethical Design workshop with 20 industrial leading designers
  • Provided inputs to the OECD’s development of measuring children’s digital well-being
  • Co-led the Inaugural Oxford Edge Early Childhood Hackathon, promoting ethical innovation in early childhood technology through collaborative hackathon focused on child-centred design principles.
  • Co-organised the 2025 Generation AI Summit in Oxford Reuben College, bringing together global leaders, researchers, and practitioners to address the critical challenges of AI design for the next generation.
  • Co-developing Parent Bench, an open-source framework for evaluating large language models designed to support parents in their digital parenting journey ethically and effectively.

In 2026, we look forward to releasing the ethical design curriculum as an open source resources for all practitioners and deepen our policy engagement related to ethical AI innovations. We thank Dr Boyin Yang and the team of FamStudio to make these amazing progresses possible.

Learn more about our work at aiethicaldesign.org.

Major research outputs in 2025

We continued to produce strong research outputs, including three accepted for publications, five papers under reviews, and two papers under preparation.

  • Child-Centered AI: Contextualizing Principles and Design in HCI. G Wang, A Atabey, K Sun, GC Lin, SK Johnston. Kruakae Pothong, Cara Wilson, Lachlan D Urquhart, Jason C Yip, Jun Zhao. ACM Interactions 32(5), 2025. https://doi.org/10.1145/375710
  • FamiData Hub: A Speculative Design Exploration with Families on Smart Home Datafication. G Wang, J Zhao, M Van Kleek, R Pea, N Shadbolt - Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713494
  • Jun Zhao, Grace C. Lin, Jason Yip, Zhen Bai, Ayça Atabey, Ge Wang, Kaiwen Sun (2025). Editorial of Special issue on Child-Centred AI. To appear
  • Jun Zhao. Designing for children’s autonomy and agency in the age of artificial intelligence. IEEE Technology & Society. Under review
  • Samantha Johnston, Rui Zhao, Jun Zhao†, and Nigel Shadbolt. The Digital Autonomy Machine Experiment: Who Decides - Me, Us, or the Machine? Under review
  • Isobel Voysey, …, Jun Zhao†, and Nigel Shadbolt. Agency in Child–AI Interaction: A Rapid Review of Its Conceptualisation, Assessment, and Support in HCI. Under review
  • Yui Kondo, … Jun Zhao†, and Luc Rocher. The Data Mirror: Helping Adolescents See and Shape Their Digital Selves on Social Media. Under review
  • Boyin Yang and Jun Zhao. Designing for Children’s Agency: How a Co-Design Curriculum Reshapes Designers’ Thinking. Under preparation
  • Desiree Cho, … Jun Zhao. Evaluating feedback mechanisms for aligning YouTube recommendations with user interests. Under preparation

Upcoming events in 2026

  • 15 January: CHAILD team to present at the Oxford MPLS AI & Ethics conference
  • 15-20 February: Indian AI Impact Summit
  • 15 February: Launch of Ethical Innovation white paper
  • 13 -17 April: CHI 2026 in Barcelona
  • 13 April: CHAILD’s Agency Workshop at CHI 2026: https://oxfordhcc.github.io/CAMCAD/
  • April: Supporting Children’s Agency in the age of AI workshop in Oxford
  • 2-3 July: Future of AI workshop Paris

2026 will be a busy and productive year for Oxford CCAI. We cannot wait to continue to share our journey with many of you who share our passion of building a fairer and more ethical world for our future generations.