International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender Systems (KidRec)

Resources for children are abundant, but finding suitable and appropriate resources for children in our information-rich society can be challenging. Due to this abundance of information, systems to find and recommend appropriate information for children are needed. Recommender systems (RS) for children have only recently begun to be researched. This area of research brings together researchers in education, child-development, computer scientists, designers, and more who address several issues including those related to education, algorithms, ethics, privacy, security. In this workshop we will: discuss and identify issues related to RS designed for children including challenges and limitations, discuss possible solutions to the identified challenges and plan for future research, and of critical importance work to build a community that explicitly looks at these critical issues. This workshop has a specific theme of educationally-related recommendations, but welcomes other child-oriented recommender system contributions

Investigating Query Formulation Assistance for Children

Popular tools used to search for online resources are tuned to satisfy a broad category of users—primarily adults. Because children have specific needs, these tools may not always be successful in offering the right level of support in their quest for information. While search tools often provide query assistance, children still face many difficulties expressing their information needs in the form of a query. In this paper, we share results from our ongoing research work focused on understanding children\u27s interactions with query suggestions and their preferences with respect to suggestions offered by a general-purpose strategy versus a counterpart designed exclusively for children. Our goal is to inform researchers and developers about when it is necessary to turn to technologies tailored exclusively for children and to further outline needs that should be addressed when it comes to designing query-formulation-related technology for children

3rd KidRec workshop: What does good look like?

Today's children spend considerable time online, searching and receiving information from various websites and apps. While searching for information, e.g. for school or hobbies, children use search systems to locate resources and receive site recommendations that might be useful for them. The call for good, reliable, child-friendly systems has been made many times and the thesis that the algorithms of "adult" information systems are not necessarily suitable or fair for children is widely accepted. However, there is still no clear and balanced view on what makes one search/recommendation system for children good or better than other systems, nor on what content should be considered "good enough to be retrieved" or recommended. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in education, child-development, computer science, and more who can address this questions while considering issues related to education, algorithms, ethics, privacy, evaluation

3\u3csup\u3e\u3cem\u3erd\u3c/em\u3e\u3c/sup\u3e KidRec Workshop: What Does Good Look Like?

Today’s children spend considerable time online, searching and receiving information from various websites and apps. While searching for information, e.g. for school or hobbies, children use search systems to locate resources and receive site recommendations that might be useful for them. The call for good, reliable, child-friendly systems has been made many times and the thesis that the algorithms of “adult” information systems are not necessarily suitable or fair for children is widely accepted. However, there is still no clear and balanced view on what makes one search/recommendation system for children good or better than other systems, nor on what content should be considered “good enough to be retrieved” or recommended. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in education, child-development, computer science, and more who can address this questions while considering issues related to education, algorithms, ethics, privacy, evaluation

“My Name is My Password:” Understanding Children’s Authentication Practices

Children continue to use technology at an increasing rate, more and more of which require authentication via usernames and passwords.We seek to understand how children ages 5-11 years old create and use their credentials. We investigate children’s username and password understanding and practices from the perspective of both children and adults within the context of three security categories: credential composition (e.g. length of password), performance (e.g. time to enter), and credential mechanisms (e.g; a pattern or characters). We conducted a semi-structured interview with 22 children and an online survey with 33 adult participants (parents and teachers) to determine their practices and involvement in facilitating authentication for their children. Our study illustrates how children have a limited understanding of authentication, and that there are differences between children’s and adult’s understanding of good authentication and security practices, and what they actually do

A Conversational Robot for Children’s Access to a Cultural Heritage Multimedia Archive

In this paper we introduce a conversational robot designed to assist children in searching a museum’s cultural heritage video archive. The robot employs a form of Spoken Conversational Search to facilitate the clarification of children’s interest (their information need) in specific videos from the archive. Children are typically insufficiently supported in this process by common search technologies such as search-bar and keyboard, or one-shot voice interfaces. We present our approach, which leverages a knowledge-graph representation of the museum’s video archive to facilitate conversational search interactions and suggest content based on the interaction, in order to study information-seeking conversations with children. We plan to use the robot test-bed to investigate the effectiveness of conversational designs over one-shot voice interactions for clarifying children’s information needs in a museum context

The Last Decade of HCI Research on Children and Voice-based Conversational Agents

Voice-based Conversational Agents (CAs) are increasingly being used by children. Through a review of 38 research papers, this work maps trends, themes, and methods of empirical research on children and CAs in HCI research over the last decade. A thematic analysis of the research found that work in this domain focuses on seven key topics: ascribing human-like qualities to CAs, CAs’ support of children’s learning, the use and role of CAs in the home and family context, CAs’ support of children’s play, children’s storytelling with CA, issues concerning the collection of information revealed by CAs, and CAs designed for children with differing abilities. Based on our findings, we identify the needs to account for children's intersectional identities and linguistic and cultural diversity and theories from multiple disciples in the design of CAs, develop heuristics for child-centric interaction with CAs, to investigate implications of CAs on social cognition and interpersonal relationships, and to examine and design for multi-party interactions with CAs for different domains and contexts

Does your robot know? Enhancing children's information retrieval through spoken conversation with responsible robots

In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as search engines on a computer or voice agents, do not always meet their specific needs. The conversational robot we propose maintains context, asks clarifying questions, and gives suggestions in order to better meet children's needs. Since children are often too trusting of robots, we propose to have the robot measure, monitor and adapt to the trust the child has in the robot. This way, we hope to induce a critical attitude with the children during their information retrieval process.Comment: IR4Children'21 workshop at SIGIR 2021 - http://www.fab4.science/IR4C

The concept of learning goals will always be in my head"-Aligning and Applying Learning Goals in Participatory Design in a School Context

In this paper, we explore applying learning goals in participatory design (PD) practice as an approach to mutual learning in a school context. The paper is based on experiences from master students in interaction design, who were instructed to define learning goals for children participating in PD activities that they organized in a school context. Based on the results of this study, we suggest a number of strategies for aligning and applying learning goals in PD in school contexts in practice: Debrief the results from the children\u27s reflections with the teachers, Scalability in regard to time and context, Adjust to age, Collaborate with the teacher to define specific learning goals, Formulate learning gains for the teachers, and Develop support materials