Overview - News and Activities - Collaborators - Student Projects - Contact

Project overview

Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving to mimic human-like cognition, emotions, conversations, and decision-making. Yet, how AI affects children is not well studied. The PAIZ project (pronounced as pies, where Z refers to the younger GenerationZ, ages 9-12 years) addresses this gap.

PAIZ employs participatory approaches with children to design and discuss ethical AI, now and in the future, with an emphasis on fairness and human agency and oversight in algorithmic decision-making. This is achieved through hands-on sessions with children critically exploring and designing AI-systems for decision-making that affects their everyday experiences. Further, discussions and interviews with the various stakeholders (e.g. teachers and parents) that have an influence on children’s everyday lives are also conducted. Since fairness and human-agency are socio-culturally situated, the research is conducted at various locations across the world, through its extensive collaboration network. 

Project outcomes include devising participatory approaches employing design fiction with schoolchildren for designing AI-systems that affect their technology experiences and use now and in the future; collecting data (text, images, audio, and video materials) created by children; and developing stakeholder-inclusive cross-cultural frameworks for ethical AI for and with children, with a focus on fairness, and human-agency and oversight. A research blog is maintained, where the methods and materials are published for other researchers to replicate the work with schools in their network.

The project extends ongoing work on global policy on AI for children, by being child-led, cross-cultural, and future-oriented. This means involving children from across the world as experts of their lived experiences and as creative and critical thinkers with their own distinct worldviews considering possible, plausible, and provocative solutions for the future.

News and Activities

2023 

  • Upcoming​ events
    • Spring 2023 - extensive workshops with OIS 3rd and 7th graders on Robots in the Classroom using the Nao v6 robot
    • PAIZ workshops in the USA and Japan. 

2022

Workshops

  • PAIZ workshop using the robot Nao v6 with 7th graders at a public school in New Delhi, India, on Nov 22nd (week 47, info here, FICORE article).
  • PAIZ workshop on Participatory AI with a school in New Delhi on Nov 16th and 17th (week 46).
  • AI day 2022 poster presentation on outcomes from the NordiCHI workshop on Age Against the Machine (week 45, workshop info).
  • Workshop at Urdu Ghar in old city, Hyderabad, on imagining the future of social communication for minority communities based on their information gathering and sharing experiences and behaviors during the pandemic (week 45)
  • EDUFI AIAI workshop at IndiaHCI on 9th Nov in Hyderabad (week 45, info here)
  • Participatory AI in FabLab BusinessAsema Oulu, Finland (week 43, info here)
  • NordiCHI 2022 workshop on 9th Oct in Aarhus on Age Against the Machine: A Call for Designing Ethical AI for and with Children in Aarhus, Denmark (week 40) (info here)
  • Participatory AI with 9th graders in local school in Oulu on Sep 29th in the city center Fab Lab, and at the school on Oct 5th and Oct 19th.
  • Pilot workshop on Participatory AI in FabLab BusinessAsema Oulu, Finland (Week 24)
  • Oh no, my dog is a blueberry muffin! Learning about Algorithms and AI, an open workshop at the Amazing North event in Oulu on May 31st and June 1st 2022 (Week 22) (event info here and here).
  • Pilot workshop on Participatory AI in Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya Chirag Delhi Senior Secondary School in Soami Nagar, New Delhi, India (Week 17)
  • Pilot workshop on Participatory AI in FabLab BusinessAsema Oulu, Finland (Week 10)
  • Participatory and Empowering AI for Children at MozillaFestival 2022 on Mar 7th 2022 (Week 10) (event info)

Expert presentations

  • Design Futuring for Love, Friendship, and Kinships: Five Perspectives on Intimacy at alt.CHI 2022 (Week 18) (paper and presentation video)
  • Participatory AI with Children: in pursuit of fair and inclusive technology futures at IIIT-Delhi's Research Innovation and Incubation Showcase (RIISE) 2022 seminar on Apr 8th 2022 (Week 14)

Other

  • Visit to the Finnish Ambassador to India's residence for the reception of the Finnish Minister of Science and Culture Petri Honkonen. 
  • Organsing Women in AI's Educate and Lead talks with Dr. Noura Howell and Founder Coding and more Supriya Bhuwalka at the Oulu International School on Oct 21st and Nov 4th, with ICT teacher Pooka Kakkar.
  • PAIZ project mentioned in UNESCO's State of the education report for India, 2022 - Artificial Intelligence in education; here, there and everywhere report with a picture from the PAIZ workshop in New Delhi in April 2022 (one page 57 of the report, LinkedIn post)

2021 - Expert presentations and discussions

  • Panel discussion on Generating inclusive transdisciplinary knowledge(s) at the threshold of arts, science & society: Critical perspectives by researchers and practitioners as a part of Aalto University's Color of Science seminars on Nov 23rd 2021 (event info).
  • Public lecture on Participatory AI with Children: In Pursuit of Fair and Inclusive Technology Futures in Aalto University's Critical AI & Crisis Interrogatives (CRAI-CIS) Seminar on Nov 11th 2021 (event info).
  • Poster presentation on Making sense of how to create ethical AI for young children with autism in Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI) AI-Day on Nov 4th 2021 (event info, poster and video).
  • Expert presentation on Designing Ethical AI for Young Children in HCI4SouthAsia's AI for the Next Billion seminar on Oct 28th 2021 (event info).

Project Collaborators

Grace Eden, Assistant Professor,
Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIITD), New Delhi, India
Noura Howell, Assistant Professor,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia, USA.
Charu Monga, Assistant Professor,
Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IITD), New Delhi, India
Wricha Mishra, Associate Professor,
HoD, Department of User Experience Design, MAEER's MIT Institute of Design, Pune, India

Contact

PAIZ is funded by Academy of Finland (postdoc project) for three years (Sep 2021-Aug 2024). Please email the project PI, Dr. Sumita Sharma, at sumita.sharma(at)oulu.fi for more details about the project and to collaborate.

[Page last updated Dec 26th 2022]