New project uses empathy to teach students about cybersecurity and AI ethics

Yang Wang
Yang Wang, Associate Professor
Yun Huang
Yun Huang, Associate Professor

While empathy is important in almost every aspect of daily life, it is not always a priority in the development of technology, especially technology using artificial intelligence (AI). iSchool researchers are working to address this gap by using empathy to teach high school students about cybersecurity and AI ethics issues. Led by Associate Professor Yang Wang, the project, "Teaching High School Students about Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Ethics via Empathy-Driven Hands-On Projects," has received a two-year, $297,575 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER). Assistant Professor Yun Huang; Pilyoung Kim, associate professor of psychology at the University of Denver; and Tom Yeh, associate professor of computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, will serve as co-principal investigators.

"We have seen many AI technologies that are fraught with ethical issues, for instance, having implicit biases toward certain populations or treating them unfairly," said Wang. "If we want tomorrow's AI technologies to be ethical, we need to plant the seed today and educate the future AI designers now."

According to Wang, developers are under a lot of pressure to ship products quickly, so ethics and empathy tend to get sidelined or ignored. In addition, "developers probably didn't get empathy-driven education when they were in school."

"Our project makes an initial step towards changing that," he said.

For their project, the researchers will develop hands-on labs that cover a variety of scenarios, such as online gaming, social media, mobile apps, and smart toys. The labs, which will be made publicly available for schools to use, will include real-life examples of young children who are interacting with unethical AI or exposed to cybersecurity risks. Using a cutting-edge non-invasive neuro-imaging technique, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), the researchers will be able to assess the impact of these labs on the activation of brain regions associated with empathy in high school students.

"We hope the hands-on labs we develop in this project are effective and will be adopted widely in teaching high school students about AI and cybersecurity ethics issues," said Wang. "And that students will have more empathy for others, especially those who are vulnerable and can be disproportionately affected by these emerging technologies."

Wang conducts research focusing on usable privacy and security technologies, social computing, human-computer interaction, and explainable artificial intelligence. He earned his PhD in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine.

Huang's research areas include social computing, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and crowdsourcing. She received her PhD in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

iSchool researchers work with diverse groups to improve user experience

iSchool faculty are studying ways to improve user experience, with a common goal of improving technology and applications for the needs of individual users. These researchers are working with diverse groups to gain feedback, and several current projects are focused on experiences for users with disabilities.

Das receives student membership award from ASIS&T

PhD student Puranjani Das has been selected as a recipient of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) SIG CMR Student Membership Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. She will receive a complimentary one-year membership in both ASIS&T and SIG CMR, a special interest group focused on classification and metadata research.

Puranjani Das

Kim defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.

Jenna Kim headshot

Desai defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Smit Desai successfully defended his dissertation, "Designing Metaphor-fluid Voice User Interfaces," on June 10.

Smit Desai

Student says ‘thank you’ with a helicopter ride

Last month, Michael Ferrer showed appreciation for one of his MSIM instructors in a unique way—by inviting him for an insider’s look at his work as a reservist in the Illinois Army National Guard. For the ILARNG BOSS Lift, which took place on June 18 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, Ferrer selected Michael Wonderlich, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior associate director of business intelligence and enterprise architecture for Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) at the University of Illinois.

Michael Wonderlich and Michael Ferrer hold a U of I flag in front of a military helicopter