We are thrilled to announce that the EWADA Team has achieved significant success, with four major research papers accepted for publication by Nature Machine Intelligence, CHI2024, and WWW2024. These prestigious academic venues are highly competitive, and our researchers have put in tremendous effort to achieve these outstanding results. The papers cover a diverse range of topics, including the research agenda for supporting child-centered AI, the development and assessment of new ways to enhance families’ critical thinking regarding datafication, children’s data autonomy, and users’ ability to navigate data terms of use in decentralized settings.

Ge Wang, Jun Zhao, Max Van Kleek and Nigel Shadbolt. Challenges and opportunities in translating ethical AI principles into practice for children. Nature Machine Intelligence. To appear

Led by Tiffany Ge and Dr Jun Zhao, the perspective paper discusses the current global landscape of ethics guidelines for AI and their correlation with children. The article critically assesses the strategies and recommendations proposed by current AI ethics initiatives, identifying the critical challenges in translating such ethical AI principles into practice for children. The article provides timely and crucial recommendations regarding embedding ethics into the development and governance of AI for children.

Ge Wang, Jun Zhao, Max Van Kleek and Nigel Shadbolt. KOALA Hero Toolkit: A New Approach to Inform Families of Mobile Datafication Risks. CHI 2024. Overall acceptance rate 26.3%. To appear

This is the final evaluation study of the KOALA Hero research project, led by Dr Jun Zhao and partially supported by EWADA. In this work we present a new hybrid toolkit, KOALA Hero, designed to help children and parents jointly understand the datafication risks posed by their mobile apps. Through user studies involving 17 families, we assess how the toolkit influenced families’ thought processes, perceptions and decision-making regarding mobile datafication risks. Our findings show that KOALA supports families’ critical thinking and promotes family engagement, providing timely inputs on global efforts aimed at addressing datafication risks and underscoring the importance of strengthening legislative and policy enforcement of ethical data governance.

This work has also contributed to Dr Zhao’s discussion paper to be publised by the British Academy, jointly authored with Dr Ekaterina Hertog from Oxford Internet Institute and Ethics in AI Institute and Professor Netta Weinstein from University of Reading.

Ge Wang, Jun Zhao, Max Van Kleek and Nigel Shadbolt. CHAITok: A Proof-of-Concept System Supporting Children’s Sense of Data Autonomy. CHI 2024. Overall acceptance rate 26.3%. To appear

A core part of EWADA’s mission, CHAITok explores children’s ‘sense of data autonomy’. In this paper, we present CHAITok, a Solid-Based Android mobile application designed to enhance children’s sense of autonomy over their data on social media. Through 27 user study sessions with 109 children aged 10–13, we offer insights into the current lack of data autonomy among children regarding their online information and how we can foster children’s sense of data autonomy through a socio-technical journey. Our findings provide crucial insights into children’s values, how we can better support children’s evolving autonomy, and design for children’s digital rights. We emphasize data autonomy as a fundamental right for children, call for further research, design innovation, and policy changes on this critical issue.

Rui Zhao and Jun Zhao. Perennial Semantic Data Terms of Use for Decentralized Web. WWW 2024. Overall acceptance rate 20.2%. To appear.

Our latest research article address a significant challenge in decentralized Web architectures, such as Solid, specifically focusing on how to help users navigate numerous applications and decide which application can be trusted with access to their data Pods.

Currently, this process often involves reading lengthy and complex Terms of Use agreements, which users often find daunting or simply ignore. This compromises user autonomy and impedes detection of data misuse. To address this issue, EWADA researchers have developed a novel formal description of Data Terms of Use (DToU), along with a DToU reasoner. Users and applications can specify their own parts of the DToU policy with local knowledge, covering permissions, requirements, prohibitions and obligations. Automated reasoning verifies compliance, and also derives policies for output data. This constitutes a perennial DToU language, where the policy authoring occurs only once, allowing ongoing automated checks across users, applications and activity cycles. Our solution has been successfully integrated into the Solid framework with promising performance results. We believe this work demonstrates a practicality of a perennial DToU language and the potential for a paradigm shift in how users interact with data and applications in a decentralized Web, offering both improved privacy and usability.

All papers are currently in preparation for the camera-ready stage. Once finalised, you can find them on our publication page. We welcome your feedback and any follow-up questions.