Hello everyone, I'm Lara Piccolo. I'm a research fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at
the Open University and I'm presenting this work co-authored by professor Harith Alani
also from KMi and Pinelopi Troullinou from Trilateral Research. So, this work entitled
"Chatbots to Support Children in Coping with Online Threats: Social-Technical Requirements"
was conducted as part of the Centre for Policing Research and Learning at the Open University.
As everybody knows very well by now the pandemic has forced us to spend far more time online
and with children is not different. They really have to be online for learning, for socialising,
for playing, and, as a consequence, they not only spend more time but we have even younger kids
using social media and getting involved with online activities. As a consequence of that,
they are more exposed to online threats. As UNICEF has called out, is our duty to keep these children
informed, engaged and empowered to cope with these online threats, because, just as everybody else,
they do need to be online now. Just to give an idea, in the UK from 12 to 15 years old,
most of the children own a smartphone, they are on social media, and more than 80% acknowledged having
at least one harmful experience in the year. And we can see that even before the pandemic, in 2019,
the reports of online sexual abuse had already increased by almost 20%, so the situation must be
really alarming now during the pandemic. In this research, we look at chatbots (or conversational
agents), a technology that has already been applied to improve well-being and mental health
and things like that, whether this technology could help these children to cope with online
threats and how. But we wanted to build this understanding from the children's perspective to
understand their motivations, their concerns, and translate that into social-technical requirements.
More towards the design, our research questions were "what are the main tasks
they expected for this chatbot" and "how this dialogue should be structured".
To make this happen, we recruited school children from primary and secondary
schools ageing from 11 to 17 years old, and we approached the schools through an online safety
charity that delivers online safety lessons at schools, so that the participatory design
activity was actually an extension of an online safety lesson. We had to put in places some
safeguarding procedures to be prepared in the case of having an emotional distress,
but we designed our methodology to not draw upon personal experience. We didn't
want the kids to bring their past there, but we wanted them to be creative, and play with
the possibilities of what this chatbot could do. To do so, we use the LEGO mini-figures.
We relied on this association that we most of us have between LEGO and fun and role-playing,
and we asked then to create stories, in groups, featuring a young person dealing with an online
abuse. And this person needed to receive the support by a chatbot. The chatbot was the robot
that was part of the kit of mini-figures they received, so every kit has the
robot and any other characters could be configured as they wish it, as the story
was open to that. This figure illustrates here we captured just the hands and the figures,
and nothing that could identify the children. We collected data in different ways, not only through
the performances. We had an initial survey just to understand how they perceive online safety,
to understand our context, and we had a form that was quite important to review requirements,
as we call it "Reflection as Requirements". It was an A3 form that they filled in groups, so along
the process of conceiving the performance they discussed when the chatbot could be helpful or
not, what would put them off to use the chatbot, or what would attract them, things like that.
Then, we recorded the performance and we had a final survey to collect their feelings towards
the chatbot, after they built this understanding of what this chatbot could be. We had 110
children participating almost half in primary and half in secondary schools, in three schools
across 8 workshops that generated 22 videos. This is an illustration of the classroom,
so the number of participants in each group were really defined by the setup in the classrooms,
and the performances were recorded in a different environment where the groups could be isolated
from the noise and we could capture just the hands. We analyzed the data looking at the
chatbot' roles and how it should be designed, so different methods gave us different insights
in terms, for instance, the performance was really strong in terms of what how the dialogue should
be, the structure if there were any differences between primary and secondary schools, who were
the stakeholders that appear in the stories and what sort of online abuse they were talking about.
The form Reflection as Requirements also brought personal circumstances when the chatbot could
be helpful or not, how they expect it to behave, usability and technical features too,
and the surveys were more towards their feelings and also about other stakeholders involved.
To structure all these results and transform it into social-technical requirements we relied on
this framework, the semiotic framework by Stamper, which is part of a methodology called Organization
Semiotics, which splits the aspects of the information into technical and social, so we could
put together the requirements from the platform and devices that would be more adequate for this
chatbot, until the impact of these solutions to the users and to other stakeholders involved.
This framework was very helpful to structure all these different nuances of our findings.
Bringing a bit of these results in terms of perception, the chatbot was
seeing as "someone to talk when you don't want to talk", so no judgment, no embarrassment,
but as an opportunity to release the stress, and to open their chest. The participants
clearly recognized that there is an ideal level of stress and severity when the chatbot could be
useful. Things too critical, it should not be taken, and they express a high expectations for
performance. They expect the chatbot to be better than humans because of this lack of judgment.
The chatbot was seen as an extension, as an entry point for children's protection services that
they know already, and they also show that they have some fears of leakage of information, and
that the technology, the chatbot, could act without their consent, for instance, contacting
a perpetrator. The participation of parents was quite interesting, was a bit controversial. In
some stories, the chatbot was an alternative when the parents let the kids down because they didn't
give attention to the matter or they didn't know what to do. But also for especially younger kids,
the parents could be using the chatbot together, and the chatbot would actually help them to assess
the situation and make a decision about what to do. In terms of tasks, they clearly
expressed that everything should start with the chatbot getting the user's trust, by explaining
how it works explaining what information should be captured or not, stored or not. Then, start
assessing the situation, how critical it is, or what steps they have been taken already, and
provide adequate advice for further steps. But along this process, support the user
emotionally to make sure that the person is feeling good while the dialogue is happening.
We captured this expected structure of the dialogue, it was kind of a pattern that appeared
and the basic style for every part of the dialogue. We also created this conversation
flow, which is the first step towards deploying this technology. As final remarks,
the chatbot was clearly part of an articulated solution, was not only a standalone solution,
was part of existing children's protection services. We're working in a context where
children were educated on online safety and they were aware of this existing support, which for
sure would be different in other scenarios. And we have to keep in mind that this technology
should be complementary to human support, and not expecting to replace it because we are dealing
with very critical things, critical situations, and also with emotions. If you have any questions
or suggestions, please, I'm happy to receive your contact. Thank you!