AI for Youth and Families with Special Needs: Who Gets a Say, and When?
Event Description
Abstract: AI is reaching children faster than the rules meant to protect them. Schools are pushed toward early AI exposure, chatbot safety rules lag behind, and families of young people with autism and intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) often wait longest for support. This talk asks who gets a say in the AI built for young people and their families, and when. I examine three settings, and each one brings families in earlier. The first is platform governance for young children. When YouTube implemented children's privacy law through a Made for Kids label, content creators had to classify their own videos, and parents stepped in mostly for the harms they could see. Creators and parents carried the costs after the rules were set. The second is safety by design for teenagers. We built MOSafely, a teen-centered online risk detection tool, and asked 33 online safety experts to review it before it reached teens. The experts found that to protect teens' messages, the tool must read them. The third is AI support for families with special needs. With caregivers of young adults with autism and IDD, we co-designed AI support for the workplace and found that such support can make workers too visible to employers. Across the three settings, families move from carrying the costs of technology to shaping its design. I close with a question for my next five years. Who decides when AI is ready for a family's home?
Bio: Renkai Ma is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Technology at the University of Cincinnati. He designs, builds, and evaluates various AI technologies that support the safety and well-being of children and adolescents, parents and caregivers, and autistic people and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). His research spans platform governance for young children, safety by design for teenagers, and AI support for families with special needs. His work appears at ACM CHI, CSCW, WWW, UIST, IDC, and DIS. In 2026, he was one of eight recipients of the University of Cincinnati's University Research Council Faculty Scholars Research Award. He received his Ph.D. in Informatics from Penn State, was a postdoctoral scholar at Vanderbilt University, and conducted user experience research at Meta and SiriusXM.
Location: Seminar Room 1310, Old Computer Science Building, Stony Brook University
Bio: Renkai Ma is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Technology at the University of Cincinnati. He designs, builds, and evaluates various AI technologies that support the safety and well-being of children and adolescents, parents and caregivers, and autistic people and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). His research spans platform governance for young children, safety by design for teenagers, and AI support for families with special needs. His work appears at ACM CHI, CSCW, WWW, UIST, IDC, and DIS. In 2026, he was one of eight recipients of the University of Cincinnati's University Research Council Faculty Scholars Research Award. He received his Ph.D. in Informatics from Penn State, was a postdoctoral scholar at Vanderbilt University, and conducted user experience research at Meta and SiriusXM.
Location: Seminar Room 1310, Old Computer Science Building, Stony Brook University
