"New Project Uses Empathy to Teach Students about Cybersecurity and AI Ethics"

Empathy is essential in almost every aspect of daily life, but it is often overlooked in the development of technology, especially technology in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used. Researchers at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are working to fill this gap by using empathy to teach high school students about cybersecurity and AI ethics issues. The project titled "Teaching High School Students about Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Ethics via Empathy-Driven Hands-On Projects" received a two-year, $297,575 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER). Associate Professor and project leader Yang Wang has said that many AI technologies have been observed laden with ethical issues, such as having implicit biases toward certain populations or giving them unfair treatment. It is important to plant the seed today and educate future AI designers so tomorrow's AI technologies can be ethical. According to Wang, developers face a lot of pressure to get products out fast, which results in ethics and empathy being sidelined or ignored. For the project, researchers will develop hands-on labs that delve into various scenarios, such as social media, mobile apps, smart toys, and online gaming. The labs will be publicly available for schools to use. They will include real-life examples of young children interacting with unethical AI or being exposed to cybersecurity risks. The researchers will evaluate the impact of these labs on the activation of brain regions associated with empathy in high school students by using a cutting-edge and non-invasive neuro-imaging technique. This article continues to discuss the goals, components, and expectations of the new project that teaches students about cybersecurity and AI ethics using empathy. 

iSchool reports "New Project Uses Empathy to Teach Students about Cybersecurity and AI Ethics"