Technology-Assisted Education
Much of the effort to prevent online child abuse focuses on detecting online perpetrators. While that’s helpful, Cho said, it’s limited because it leaves children and teens vulnerable to abusers.
For several years, Cho has been working on a project that would go further and give children tools and training to help them protect themselves from abusers who use the Internet to groom children and teens for sexual exploitation. It’s been a challenge because there are so many ethical questions involved in educating children about abusers and the tactics they use, she said.
This new project will focus on developing chatbots to simulate interactions between predators and children online. These simulations can then be used to develop an educational program aimed primarily at young people aged 11 to 15.
Given the challenges, this is a highly collaborative project.
Huangassistant professor of computer science, will work on various aspects of the AI that powers robots.
“I have a very strong interest and belief in using AI techniques to solve social problems,” Huang said.
It will build on his previous research in conversational AI, which uses large language models to make educational robots believable as humans interacting with each other.
Leealso an assistant professor of computer science, will work on compiling data to train the bots. It’s a particularly thorny topic, he said, because he’ll have to find data on how predators interact online and use it responsibly.
“The challenge of this work is that there is no authentic data of cybergrooming conversations that we can use to train chatbots,” Lee said. “We plan to address the problem using human-centered approaches and establish an ethical platform in which adolescents and their parents can collaborate to generate such data and improve their awareness of cybergrooming as part of the data collection process.”
Pamela WisniewskiAnother collaborator is associate professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University and an expert on online privacy and safety for teens. She will work under the direction of a Related grant of $344,874 from the National Science Foundation consult with teens and experts in online abuse and sex trafficking prevention to develop training materials and ensure chatbots are safe for minors to use.
“I hope we can design, develop and evaluate a tool that can help teens by teaching them the risks of cybergrooming, as well as coping mechanisms to protect themselves from those risks,” Wisniewski said. “The goal is not to restrict and monitor their Internet use. Rather, we need to give them the tools to navigate the Internet safely.”
