Good for Children, Good for All?

In this work, we reason how focusing on Information Retrieval (IR) for children and involving them in participatory studies would benefit the IR community. The Child Computer Interaction (CCI) community has embraced the child as a protagonist as their main philosophy, regarding children as informants, co-designers, and evaluators, not just...

Learning Technologies & AI: Who are we designing for?

Focused on children and the learning context, we argue for the importance of designing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that take a holistic view of their target users. Rather than prioritize system performance, these smart technologies can be tuned to assist users throughout the task completion process. We argue that considering...

How does Information Pollution Challenge Children’s Right to Information Access?

Informed by existing literature, in addition to lessons learned from ongoing research work pertaining to online information seeking, in this contribution, we discuss our view of how information pollution affects a critical yet understudied user group: children. We first highlight the need to take into account the unique characteristics of...

Children on ChatGPT Readability in an Educational Context: Myth or Opportunity?

In this work, we present the results of a preliminary exploration aiming to understand whether the use of ChatGPT in an educational context can be an asset to meet the specific needs of the students. In particular, we focus on the possibility of adapting the responses to online inquiries related to the primary school curriculum to meet the...

Where a Little Change Makes a Big Difference: A Preliminary Exploration of Children’s Queries

This paper contributes to the discussion initiated in a recent SIGIR paper describing a gap in the information retrieval (IR) literature on query understanding–where they come from and whether they serve their purpose. Particularly the connection between query variability and search engines regarding consistent and equitable access to all...