Netherlands Regulating Tech

Another instructive regulation example.

How the Netherlands Is Taming Big Tech  By The New York Times, January 20, 2023

Microsoft chief privacy officer Julie Brill, at left, during in a 2018 White House discussion on childrens use of the Internet.

Microsoft chief privacy officer Julie Brill, at left, worked with the Dutch government on privacy issues.

In the Netherlands, government and educational institutions have pushed big tech companies to make significant privacy changes using a carrot-and-stick approach that involves negotiating their compliance with European data privacy standards.

After the Dutch Data Protection Authority said schools would have to discontinue use of Google's education apps if privacy risks were not addressed, Google responded with new privacy measures and transparency tools that will be rolled out in the Netherlands and elsewhere later this year.

Zoom also announced substantial changes to its data protection practices and policies after talks with a Dutch cooperative, SURF, that negotiates tech vendor contracts on behalf of the nation's universities and research institutions.

Now other nations are looking to the Dutch approach as they seek to regulate big tech.

From The New York Times       View Full Article - May Require Paid Subscription

COPPA and more Online

More on COPPA and updates, protecting children online.

ACM NEWS

Protecting Children's Privacy Online   By Gregory Goth, Commissioned by CACM Staff, August 30, 2022

Digital games and educational apps for children can be a boon. They keep youngsters engaged in interactive play and learning, and can give parents a break.

Unfortunately, though, a large percentage of those games' characters and features are designed not to altruistically enlighten children, but to make them spend more time on the platform–and to get their parents to spend more money on extra features.

"We assume adults are better at recognizing persuasion pressure and are hopefully less magically engaged with their parasocial relationships with characters," said Jenny Radesky, M.D.,  principal investigator of the Radesky Lab at the University of Michigan Medical School. "Kids' relationships with Elmo or Daniel Tiger or Strawberry Shortcake are very important to them, and they are more likely to follow those characters' instructions."

In her lab's most recent research on children's mobile apps, Radesky found concerning evidence that game developers are putting their interests ahead of their young audience in designing and creating their products: only 20% of 133 mobile apps played by 160 children aged 3 to 5 had no manipulative design features intended to better monetize the child's experience.

The manipulative features Radesky and her colleagues found included parasocial relationship pressure, fabricated time pressure, navigation constraints, and the use of "attractive lures" to encourage longer game play or more in-app purchases. These features are usually tied to data collection mechanisms that exploit a child's inherent trust.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Open, seemed to confirm concerning results published elsewhere in recent months:

An analysis of evident privacy policies in products in the Google and Apple app stores by fraud, privacy, and compliance data analytics firm Pixalate, found 11% of child-directed apps in the Google Play store, and 21% of those in the Apple store, had potential access to users' personal information but no detectable privacy policy; almost 250,000 had no discernible country of origin, a nightmare for enforcement agencies.

An examination by Human Rights Watch of how well (or poorly) educational technology deployed for remote schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic protected children's privacy found that 145 of 169 educational applications "appeared to engage in data practices that put children's rights at risk, contributed to undermining them, or actively infringed on these rights."

Radesky said that while it is evident across all this research that children's privacy and priorities are given short shrift by app and game designers, it is also an encouraging sign that children's needs are now being given more widespread attention. What is not so evident is some sort of consensus about how best to address these shortcomings.

Numerous existing laws such as the U.S. federal government's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), in place since 1998 and updated in 2013, and the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in place since 2018, offer some level of privacy protection. However, the increasing complexity of the digital ecosystem has revealed loopholes in some of these policies that allow app developers to skirt the boundaries–and sometimes, to cross the line–of what's thical, if not outright illegal.  .... ' 

For example, COPPA's primary goal is to place parents in control of the information online games and services collect from their children under age 13. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), it applies without question to developers whose products collect, use, or disclose personal information from those children, or on whose behalf such information is collected or maintained (such as when personal information is collected by an ad network to serve targeted advertising).  .... ' 

Future Changing Childhood Survey

 Thought this was interesting, as we grow older.  How do the young think about technology? Other contexts of our lives?   How should e adapt a future web.  Or just let it evolve?   Future for marketing? Intro here, Click through for many samples of the survey

How Do Young People See the World Compared to the  Older Generations?  by our friend Irving Vladowsky-Berger

“There is an emerging narrative about a growing intergenerational divide worldwide,” said a recent international survey  conducted by The Changing Childhood Project.   “In the media and in popular culture, the young are often portrayed as impatient, militant, outspoken, and even entitled, in contrast to more sober temperaments among older people. The concept of intergenerational tension is not new. What may be new, however, is the speed with which our world is changing – and with it, childhood.”

The Changing Childhood Project is a collaboration between UNICEF, - the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children around the world, - and Gallup, - the analytics company best known for its international opinion polls. Created to explore these intergenerational shifts, the project seeks to answer a few key questions: what is it like growing up today?; how do young people see the world differently?; and, is there an intergenerational gap?

To explore these and other questions, the project conducted phone interviews in the first half of 2021 with over 22,000 individuals in 21 countries representing diverse regional and income levels:   ..... ' 

Microsoft and PeopleLens

Fascinating direction, and natural for Msoft's work in AR capabilities. 

Microsoft Research Blog

PeopleLens: Using AI to support social interaction between children who are blind and their peers

Published March 14, 2022

By Cecily Morrison , Principal Research Manager  Katherine Jones , PhD student  Martin Grayson , Principal Research Software Development Engineer  Ed Cutrell , Sr. Principal Research Manager

The PeopleLens is a new research technology designed to help people who are blind or have low vision better understand their immediate social environments by locating and identifying people in the space. Coupled with a scheme of work based on research and practices from psychology and speech and language therapy, the system can help children and young people who are blind more easily forge social connections with their peers.

For children born blind, social interaction can be particularly challenging. A child may have difficulty aiming their voice at the person they’re talking to and put their head on their desk instead. Linguistically advanced young people may struggle with maintaining a topic of conversation, talking only about something of interest to them. Most noticeably, many children and young people who are blind struggle with engaging and befriending those in their age group despite a strong desire to do so. This is often deeply frustrating for the child or young person and can be equally so for their support network of family members and teachers who want to help them forge these important connections.

PUBLICATION

PeopleLens 

The PeopleLens is a new research technology that we’ve created to help young people who are blind (referred to as learners in our work) and their peers interact more easily. A head-worn device, the PeopleLens reads aloud in spatialized audio the names of known individuals when the learner looks at them. That means the sound comes from the direction of the person, assisting the learner in understanding both the relative position and distance of their peers. The PeopleLens helps learners build a People Map, a mental map of those around them needed to effectively signal communicative intent. The technology, in turn, indicates to the learner’s peers when the peers have been “seen” and can interact—a replacement for the eye contact that usually initiates interaction between people.   ... ' 

Thinking innovatively like a Kid

McKinsey writes

Kids have a special way of cultivating creativity--and some even see their crafty ideas develop into lucrative business opportunities. Did you know that kids invented the trampoline, popsicles, and earmuffs?

  '''On #KidInventorsDay, explore these thought-provoking insights along with your favorite kid, and tap into your own imagination. And bookmark our McKinsey for Kids  collection page to see the latest in our interactive series.  ... "

Good examples, but they need help in creativity as well. ... 

China Requires Face scans for Night Game Use

More direct control of children and minor's use of games at specific hours.   Different from what Apple is planning in upcoming OS, where a person can define their own 'focus' times.  Here the government will do it for you.  Enforced by face scans.  Problematical? 

Chinese Phone Games Now Require Facial Scans to Play at Night

Ars Technica via ACM , Sam Machkovech, July 7, 2021

Chinese video game publisher Tencent has added a facial recognition system to more than 60 of its China-specific smartphone games, in order to comply with government rules to limit access to video games by minors. Users will receive a prompt to scan their face once a gameplay session exceeds an unspecified amount of time during the nation's official gaming curfew hours of 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. If adult users decline or fail the facial check, the "Midnight Patrol" system will disable gameplay. Game publishers that do not comply with the rules, which also require real-name registration systems and in-game spending caps for minors, could have their business licenses revoked.     ... '

Ghosts Using Data, Children too

Hmm, can tell you that in any business problem you have to have the correct data to derive something useful.    To walk away with some sort of algorithm that later works.  Either to create or validate a model.   So if the data is badly gathered you don't have much clue.    But it seems humans work for a model.  But from data. So why does that work at all?  ..  Some related thoughts:

The ghosts in the data,   Mar 26, 2021

Bernadette Resha, Gathering of Ghosts (2014)

Something I’ve been thinking about recently as I’ve been working at a company that operates entirely remotely and mostly asynchronously during a time when most companies are working in some variation of this model is the idea of implicit versus explicit knowledge.

Explicit knowledge is anything that you can read about, knowledge that’s easy to share and pass on. Implicit knowledge is knowledge that people gain by context that’s very hard to pull out consciously. The best example of this is from this paper on language acquisition,

Children acquire their first language by engaging with their caretakers in natural meaningful communication. From this “evidence” they automatically acquire complex knowledge of the structure of their language. Yet paradoxically they cannot describe this knowledge, the discovery of which forms the object of the disciplines of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and child language acquisition.

This is a difference between explicit and implicit knowledge—ask a young child how to form a plural and she says she doesn’t know; ask her“ here is a wug, here is another wug, what have you got?”and she is able to reply,“two wugs.” The acquisition of L1 grammar is implicit and is extracted from experience of usage rather than from explicit rules.  .... 

Exploring Exploration

A very old proposition has said that if only we could make a system as inquisitive as a child, and had it able to learn and extend its knowledge, we could get to intelligent machines.   An ultimate form of Machine learning.   We are not close to that, but the attempt continues.  I like the term: Exploring Exploration.  Bair takes a look and explains the idea and what is being done.  So how do children explore to learn?  And can we use that as a model for machines?  Extensive and not too technical report.

Exploring Exploration: Comparing Children with RL Agents in Unified Environments
Eliza Kosoy, Jasmine Collins and David Chan    Jul 24, 2020

Despite recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) research, human children are still by far the best learners we know of, learning impressive skills like language and high-level reasoning from very little data. Children’s learning is supported by highly efficient, hypothesis-driven exploration: in fact, they explore so well that many machine learning researchers have been inspired to put videos like the one below in their talks to motivate research into exploration methods. However, because applying results from studies in developmental psychology can be difficult, this video is often the extent to which such research actually connects with human cognition.  ... " 

Kids Echo

Now, with a 2+ old granddaughter, who has learned to interact vocally with an Echo, an interesting development.  Is it child abuse, as some have suggested?    How should privacy be differently addressed?

Amazon’s new Echo Dot Kids Edition comes in blue or rainbow colors  in TheVerge
Based on the third-generation Echo Dot

By Dan Seifert @dcseifert    .... "

Should Alexa be Your Child's Friend?

Should you let your children talk to and treat an assistant like Alexa as a friend?    Imaginary friends have been a common thing, is this different?      And is an assistant more or less damaging than a more featured smart phone?  Does it help children speak clearly and get feedback?   Are its dangers just examples of over exposure?   Are such assistants  important to get used to because they will proliferate?   Get smarter?   Is reassurance from a device a good idea?    Some parents and children's psych experts speak:

Should Alexa Be Your Child’s Friend?   by  Monica Chin in Tom'sGuide.

Robin E. was folding laundry when she heard her son talking to Alexa downstairs in a soft, hopeful voice. The 5-year-old was asking, "Alexa, will you be my friend?"
Robin held her breath, waiting tensely for Alexa's response. Finally, she heard the  ...  assistant say, brightly, "I’m happy to be your friend."

Robin and her husband have an Echo Spot in their bedroom and an Echo Show on their kitchen counter. Her son (who Robin requested not be named in this story) is the oldest of three children, and often has trouble connecting with his peers in his Pre-K. Alexa has been, in Robin's words, a "kind, reassuring presence" as he navigates the new social landscape.  ... " 

Screens and Kids

How negative is the now omni presense of screens on phones, tablets and computing devices?   Now integrated into every part of our lives.

A Dark Consensus About Screens
Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley    By The NYT

 The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don't want their own children anywhere near them.

A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K. ... "

Getting Machines to Learn Like Children

Our own experiments in the area of machine learning, or even recognizing trivial patterns and repeating them when needed, were far more simple.    Where does the challenge lie?

Growing a Mind in a Machine   By Bennie Mols  in CACM

"We are far from having any AI that can model the world as flexibly and as deeply as humans do, but we have at least one route to get there, and that is to reverse-engineer how these abilities work in the human mind and brain," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Josh Tenenbaum.

A man with a stack of papers in his hands walks towards a closed cupboard. In the corner of the room, an 18-month-old boy is watching the scene from a corner of the room. The man bumps to the cupboard, takes a few steps back, tries again, and bumps against the closed doors a second time. The little boy leaves the corner, walks to the cupboard, and opens both cupboard doors; then he looks up to the man, who again walks towards the cupboard. As the boy gazes at the bookshelves, the man places the stack of papers on one of the shelves.

The video described above, titled "Experiments with altruism in children and chimps," was created during a psychological experiment by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Josh Tenenbaum. He showed the video during his invited talk on "Building Machines that Learn and Think Like People" at IJCAI 2018, the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in July.  .... " 

Learn Like a Child

Learn the way a child does?   Tabula Rasa?  A very old idea that has not seen much success over decades.   Is this a new hybrid neural approach?

How Researchers Are Teaching AI to Learn Like a Child    In Science Mag

Researchers in machine learning argue that computers trained on mountains of data can learn just about anything—including common sense—with few, if any, programmed rules. These experts "have a blind spot, in my opinion," says Gary Marcus, a developmental cognitive scientist at New York University. He says computer scientists are ignoring decades of work in the cognitive sciences and developmental psychology showing that humans have innate abilities—programmed instincts that appear at birth or in early childhood—that help us think abstractly and flexibly. He believes AI researchers ought to include such instincts in their programs.

Yet many computer scientists, riding high on the successes of machine learning, are eagerly exploring the limits of what a naïve AI can do. "Most machine learning people, I think, have a methodological bias against putting in large amounts of background knowledge because in some sense we view that as a failure," says Thomas Dietterich, a computer scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He adds that computer scientists also appreciate simplicity and have an aversion to debugging complex code.

In the longer term, computer scientists expect AIs to take on tougher tasks that require flexibility and common sense. Some computer scientists are already trying.  .... " 

From Science with very good embedded Video.

Disney and Kid-Robot Interactions

Interesting thought.  Applications to robot-people interactions?     Storytelling mentioned.   Robots as androids, or more generally as devices? Do COPPA,  and other regulations,  apply the same way with robots?  What does natural mean here?  Engaging, friendly, teaching?

Disney experiments look to make kid-robot interactions more natural    by Devin Coldewey

Sooner or later, our children will be raised by robots, so it’s natural that Disney, purveyor of both robots and child-related goods, would want to get ahead of that trend. A trio of studies from its Research division aim at understanding and improving how kids converse with and otherwise interact with robots and other reasonably smart machines.  .... " 

Connecting Robotics, Future Trajectories

And more on the future of assistants.  And will the use of assistant/toys mean that children will be well primed for these capabilities?   And their acceptance of virtual worlds.    Its already well underway with their use of tablets and smartphones.  From the Conversation: 

Why connecting all the world’s robots will drive 2017’s top technology trends
If you want to make predictions for the future, you need to find the trajectory of events in the past. So to work out what shape digital technology will likely take next year, we should look back to the major developments of 2016. And the past year’s developments point to a 2017 shaped by the next phase of virtual and augmented reality, the emergence of an internet for artificial intelligence and the creation of personalised digital assistants that follow us across devices.

Virtual world

One technology in particular has dominated the news throughout the year and made the birthday wish-lists of children and adults alike: virtual reality. VR began to bloom commercially in 2016 – with HTC, Oculus (owned by Facebook) and PlayStation all releasing their latest headsets. But 2017 will almost certainly be a pivotal year for VR, given its rather precarious position on the “hype cycle”.

This is a research methodology for predicting the commercial dominance of an emerging technology as it matures and goes through periods of increasing hype, sudden disillusionment and eventual success. Presently VR is on the precipice of the “peak of inflated expectations”, where the hype exceeds the reality and quality comes second to novelty.  .... "

Childrens Toys, Data and AI

Bernard Marr in Forbes on toy assistant capabilities aimed at children.  Like the very successful adult assistants, these are ever listening,  and can gather data to be used with Big Data, which may create regulatory issues.

Caution: AI And Big Data Reaches Our Kids' Christmas Toys   Bernard Marr 

Not to be a Grinch or a Scrooge, but you’d better watch out when it comes to some of this season’s hottest Christmas toys.

Last year, I wrote about Mattel’s Hello Barbie, which responds realistically to your child by using natural language processing, machine learning and advanced analytics to parse what a child says and respond accordingly.  In order to do this, the toy has to record what the child says, send it to a cloud-based server, and receive instructions back. On Barbie, there’s a “listen” button the child has to press to start recording what she says in order to get a response.

Mattel claims that only they and their tech partner (currently) have access to these recordings, but with the newest generation of talking toys, the audience is a bit larger.

In fact, advocacy groups have filed a complaint with the FCC that some of this season’s hottest toys, including My Friend Cayla and the i-Que Intelligent Robot, are violating children’s privacy. ... " 

See COPPA   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act

Health Data Machine Learning

" ... Identifying Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder with Machine Learning Framework

Dr. Ming Li from Sun Yat-sen University CMU Joint Institute of Engineering presented “Multimodal behavior signal analysis and interpretation for young kids with ASD” as part of the Cognitive Systems Institute Speaker Series. Please continue the conversation here in this discussion group with Ming who's work can be found here https://www.jie.cmu.edu/faculty-staff/profile/li-ming.html. To see and hear a replay of today's presentation, go to: http://cognitive-science.info/community/weekly-update/ and select the recording next to October 27, 2016 presentation. Thank you, Dr. Ming! 

Dianne Fraher Fodell
Program Director, IBM Global University Programs ... " 

Stanford 100 Year AI Study

Just received.  We did a great deal of work both with Stanford and with companies that came out of that program in the late 80s.  We were among the first enterprises that got lasting value from the 'intelligent' systems of the time.  Similar studies were done then to project AI's future. .   Considerable depth in this work, which I have just started to examine.   Thoughts?

Stanford : One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100)

Stanford University has invited leading thinkers from several institutions to begin a 100-year effort to study and anticipate how the effects of artificial intelligence will ripple through every aspect of how people work, live and play.

This effort, called the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or AI100, is the brainchild of computer scientist and Stanford alumnus Eric Horvitz who, among other credits, is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

In that capacity Horvitz convened a conference in 2009 at which top researchers considered advances in artificial intelligence and its influences on people and society, a discussion that illuminated the need for continuing study of AI’s long-term implications.

Now, together with Russ Altman, a professor of bioengineering and computer science at Stanford, Horvitz has formed a committee that will select a panel to begin a series of periodic studies on how AI will affect automation, national security, psychology, ethics, law, privacy, democracy and other issues.

"Artificial intelligence is one of the most profound undertakings in science, and one that will affect every aspect of human life," said Stanford President John Hennessy, who helped initiate the project. "Given's Stanford’s pioneering role in AI and our interdisciplinary mindset, we feel obliged and qualified to host a conversation about how artificial intelligence will affect our children and our children’s children."  ..... ' 

Game Based Learning

An obvious space for the idea, would like to see it taken further.  See my long term coverage of gamification and serious games at the links below.  We even had some successes in the otherwise somber enterprise.   Still following.

The rise of game-based learning by Alice Savage meets the children taking gamification to the next level by learning to code through their own games  ... 

With many affordable products on the market, game-based learning is becoming a recognisable feature of the British classroom. Learning subjects through games can greatly improve pupil engagement in a subject and provide teachers with instant feedback, analytics and other teaching tools that can tailor a learning programme for each individual student. The rise of game-based learning has now paved the way for a new level of engagement from students with new opportunities arising for them to learn to make their own games  ... " 

Teaching Hard Math to Children

Adventures in math metaphors for teachers and parents.  How to you teach what most students fear, even to the very young?  Pass it on.    In Reddit.