Blog

At the end of September 2023, several employees of the Department for Information Systems at the University of Münster visited the Maximilian-Kolbe-Gesamtschule in Saerbeck to conduct an Information Systems workshop with two 8th grade classes as part of the school’s project week. The program included an introduction to programming with the help of an express… Read More »Workshop at German School

In the picturesque town of Vaduz, Liechtenstein, Leona, Isabella, and Johannes, gathered on a sunny August 30th for what would be the final transnational meeting of the AI-bility project. This meeting marked the culmination of a remarkable two-year journey that had taken them across Europe in pursuit of a noble goal – exploring how conversational… Read More »Reflecting on the AI-bility Project: A Journey of Innovation and Friendship

The Liechtenstein University Association, consisting of the University of Liechtenstein, Private University of Liechtenstein and the Liechtenstein Institute invited to the public event “Liechtenstein as a Science Location – Making Research Visibile!” at the University of Liechtenstein. The event provided an excellent platform for selected research projects from the three institutions to showcase their work,… Read More »Science Symposium Liechtenstein

We finally had the opportunity to carry out our experiment on a larger scale. For this, the AI-bility team went to Innsbruck to the Bundesrealgymnasium. After our first round of the experiment in November in Grenoble, we had enough time to adapt our experiment to newly gained knowledge. The difficulty of questions as well as… Read More »School Visit No. 4

This is the weekend for celebration. We have just received the following e-mail: The paper defines what we call “children’s digital companion” and describe its characteristics based on its purpose and apperance as well as how it works. Children’s digital companion is an embodied conversational agent which children can relate to and perform activities together… Read More »Our Journal Paper Accepted

Part of our AI-bility project is storytelling. We want to create different stories for young children that cover various artificial intelligence topics. Creating a new story usually starts with deciding on a specific AI concept and a spontaneous idea for a storyline. I conduct proficient research about the selected AI concept, before outlining the first… Read More »Creating a Story

Well-prepared and equipped with three conversational agents and one PC for traditional search, we left for the American School of Grenoble. Nine children between the age of 11 to 13 attended our experiment. The children tried to answer as many questions as possible in a certain time interval with one conversational assistant at each station.… Read More »School Visit No. 3

The team arrived in Grenoble, to prepare the first WP3 experiment tomorrow! This includes testing the Conversational Agents, testing and fine-tuning the whole process, and check that the time will work. Actually, we are all quite excited 🤗 <Update> … aaaand it really worked out well! Timing fits, tasks are entertaining, supervisors are helpful… Looking… Read More »Experiment prep

Writing a thesis can be quite tedious and tiring – but writing a bachelor thesis within the AI-Bility project was not like that at all. The practical foundation of my bachelor thesis was the qualitative data collected in interviews with 45 German schoolchildren. The theoretical foundation was the research article “On the Design of and… Read More »Schoolchildren’s Attitude toward and Interaction with Conversational Agents

At the beginning, we didn’t really know how our logo should look like. For sure, there should be a robot to express our research on teenagers and their ability to use conversational AI. Read here about our journey from a blank space to our logo. Alessia started out thinking about how a robot like NAO… Read More »A picture says more than 1,000 words: Developing the logo for the AI-bility project

Two task in one place: First, we conducted a project meeting to prepare work package 3. During this we will ultimately conduct experiments with various types of Conversational Agents. School children will solve different tasks with chat bots, google nest, and nao. Second, we supervised a PHD seminar of the ERCIS network: Eight PhD students… Read More »Project Meeting – Prep for WP3

We are finally able to congratulate you and the other proposers on the quality of the theme and plan sent. […] Once again, congratulations on the acceptance of the proposal and we look forward to seeing you all in Timisoara in June. ECIS 2022 Panel Chairs The long awaited e-mail finally came. We will host a panel discussion… Read More »Panel Proposal Accepted for ECIS 2022

First data collection for our exploratory field study The main focus of our second work package was to do focus group interviews with schoolchildren in order to get deeper insights in how kids interact with conversational agents. We are very happy that we found two secondary schools in the greater Münster region that were interested… Read More »School Visits

There we are. Having 6h of kids talking in German, not always linear, having to consider the GDPR. We thought about running a local system, transcribing the voice of eight kids and the moderator. There are several options that we tried to use, specifically the following: Although it was not a problem getting them up… Read More »Speech-to-Text

What kinds of conversational agents are on the market? Which of them are especially designed for children and how are they called? Prior to this project we already began to look for products which were available on the European markets. We did so only sporadically, although we did find some interesting products. It is only… Read More »Our Market Exploration

After months of Zoom meetings in which we prepared the project application and then, again, online celebrating after receiving the acceptance notification, we finally had our “real life” kick-off meeting in Münster on the 15th-16th November 2021. Of course, we had to discuss the project management, the responsibilities for the different work packages, the plans… Read More »Project Kick-Off