Adolescents struggle to understand bias and representation in AI, particularly the concept of how datasets used in machine learning can be representative of populations or not. Within early experiments in teaching about investigating bias in AI systems using the Developing AI Literacy (DAILy) curriculum, we observed participating youth struggling to understand what it meant to be represented in the output of AI tools. For example, when using Google Image Search with prompts such as “physicist” and “outdoor recreation,” participating youth did not understand the question, “Are you represented in this outcome?” We saw an opportunity to address this challenge using the Kapor Foundation's Responsible AI and Tech Justice Guide. Drawing insights from three of the six core components of the framework presented in the guide, we developed Games of Representation (GR), a series of three card-based activities using SET game cards to teach concepts of population, sample, dataset, and representation. Through game play, players manipulate datasets, role-play as stakeholders with competing interests, and explore real-world scenarios where representation matters. The GR games and corresponding guide provide educators, families, and care providers with flexible, hands-on activities for guided, playful conversations with adolescents about AI ethics. This work contributes practical resources for K-12 AI education while addressing critical gaps in youth understanding of statistical bias and stakeholder influence in AI development.

Key to the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Literacy is the identification of teaching practices used to advance youth understanding of AI concepts. AI curricula and teacher professional development have become increasingly accessible, yet little is known about in-service teachers' AI pedagogy in the classroom. We report findings from a 2-year longitudinal exploratory study of classroom AI teaching practices from 5 in-service middle school teachers. Results from a mixed-method analysis of interviews and surveys suggest that teaching practices initially emphasized AI technical content, yet the more effective second year practices focused on making AI concepts relevant using Culturally Responsive Pedagogy.

Cross-domain medical image segmentation has gained increasing interest for its potential to reduce annotation efforts and improve clinical generalization capabilities. Domain adaptation aims to tackle the domain shift that appears in different image modalities. In cross-domain segmentation, generative models often suffer from limited accuracy due to their lack of domain-specific representations. Besides, many transfer learning approaches rely on additional manual annotations for supervision, emerging paradigms such as Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) facilitate effective knowledge transfer even when labels in the target domain are entirely absent. In this study, we propose a novel Point-cloud Structure Constrained Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (PSC-UDA) framework based on a Contour-Aware Segmentation (CAS) model with a 3D contour point cloud to bridge the domain gaps appearing in cross-site and cross-domain medical images. The CAS model distills the domain-invariant kidney structure from image texture to distinguish the point cloud and characterize the kidney contour in a coarse-to-fine way. With point-to-voxel self-learning on 3D structure constraints, the proposed PSC-UDA framework addresses visual domain shift, adapting discriminative information of the kidney from the labeled source domain (CT) to the unlabeled target domain (CT/MRI), so that it realizes precise cross-domain kidney segmentation with limited labels. Experimental results prove that the proposed method outperforms the generative UDA methods and the source-free methods on three cross-domain kidney segmentation datasets, outperforming even without a target domain adaptation strategy. The source code is available at https://github.com/zzs95/PSC-UDA .

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly pervaded and reshaped almost all walks of life, but efforts to promote AI literacy in K-12 schools remain limited. There is a knowledge gap in how to prepare teachers to teach AI literacy in inclusive classrooms and how teacher-led classroom implementations can impact students. This paper reports a comparison study to investigate the effectiveness of an AI literacy curriculum when taught by classroom teachers. The experimental group included 89 middle school students who learned an AI literacy curriculum during regular school hours. The comparison group consisted of 69 students who did not learn the curriculum. Both groups completed the same pre and post-test. The results show that students in the experimental group developed a deeper understanding of AI concepts and more positive attitudes toward AI and its impact on future careers after the curriculum than those in the comparison group. This shows that the teacher-led classroom implementation successfully equipped students with a conceptual understanding of AI. Students achieved significant gains in recognizing how AI is relevant to their lives and felt empowered to thrive in the age of AI. Overall this study confirms the potential of preparing K-12 classroom teachers to offer AI education in classrooms in order to reach learners of diverse backgrounds and broaden participation in AI literacy education among young learners.

In this tech demo, we will be presenting the "Smart Greenhouse" project, a transdisciplinary one, incorporating aspects of physical computing, plant science, and data literacy. In this project, students use low-cost sensors and microcontrollers (i.e., Micro:bit) to gather environmental data, with teachers guiding data analysis, visualization, and interpretation. The MakeCode platform is used for coding, which has a block-based interface, aligning with the suggestion of its efficacy in enhancing student learning and interest in coding. Furthermore, the project provides insights into environmental conditions affecting plant health, bridging the gap between computational tasks and real-world applications. For data visualization, the CODAP tool developed by the Concord Consortium is utilized, which features an easier drag-and-drop approach to create graphs. Our demonstration will encompass the collection and visualization of environmental data, coding modifications, and hands-on audience participation. Currently implemented in various educational settings, the project has witnessed teachers' growing confidence in its execution and has shown promise in bolstering students' coding skills. For this demo, participants are encouraged to bring their laptops if they wish to create or modify Micro:bit codes to test with our greenhouse setup.

Health disparities among marginalized populations with lower socioeconomic status significantly impact the fairness and effectiveness of healthcare delivery. The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare presents an opportunity to address these inequalities, provided that AI models are free from bias. This paper aims to address the bias challenges by population disparities within healthcare systems, existing in the presentation of and development of algorithms, leading to inequitable medical implementation for conditions such as pulmonary embolism (PE) prognosis. In this study, we explore the diverse bias in healthcare systems, which highlights the demand for a holistic framework to reducing bias by complementary aggregation. By leveraging de-biasing deep survival prediction models, we propose a framework that disentangles identifiable information from images, text reports, and clinical variables to mitigate potential biases within multimodal datasets. Our study offers several advantages over traditional clinical-based survival prediction methods, including richer survival-related characteristics and bias-complementary predicted results. By improving the robustness of survival analysis through this framework, we aim to benefit patients, clinicians, and researchers by enhancing fairness and accuracy in healthcare AI systems.

AI curricula are being developed and tested in classrooms, but wider adoption is premised by teacher professional development and buy-in. When engaging in professional development, curricula are treated as set in stone, static and educators are prepared to offer the curriculum as written instead of empowered to be leaders in efforts to spread and sustain AI education. This limits the degree to which teachers tailor new curricula to student needs and interests, ultimately distancing students from new and potentially relevant content. This paper describes an AI Educator Make-a-Thon, a two-day gathering of 34 educators from across the United States that centered co-design of AI literacy materials as the culminating experience of a year-long professional development program called Everyday AI (EdAI) in which educators studied and practiced implementing an innovative curriculum for Developing AI Literacy (DAILy) in their classrooms. Inspired by the energizing and empowering experiences of Hack-a-Thons, the Make-a-Thon was designed to increase the depth and longevity of the educators' investment in AI education by positively impacting their sense of belonging to the AI community, AI content knowledge, and their self confidence as AI curriculum designers. In this paper we describe the Make-a-Thon design, findings, and recommendations for future educator-centered Make-a-Thons.

This paper describes an AI Book Club as an innovative 20-hour professional development (PD) model designed to prepare teachers with AI content knowledge and an understanding of the ethical issues posed by bias in AI that are foundational to developing AI-literate citizens. The design of the intervention was motivated by a desire to manage the cognitive load of AI learning by spreading the PD program over several weeks and a desire to form and maintain a community of teachers interested in AI education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each week participants spent an hour independently reading selections from an AI book, reviewing AI activities, and viewing videos of other educators teaching the activities, then met online for 1 hour to discuss the materials and brainstorm how they might adapt the materials for their classrooms. The participants in the AI Book Club were 37 middle school educators from 3 US school districts and 5 youth-serving organizations. The teachers are from STEM disciplines as well as Social Studies and Art. Eighty-nine percent were from underrepresented groups in STEM and CS. In this paper we describe the design of the AI Book Club, its implementation, and preliminary findings on teachers' impressions of the AI Book Club as a form of PD, thoughts about teaching AI in classrooms, and interest in continuing the book club model in the upcoming year. We conclude with recommendations for others interested in implementing a book club PD format for AI learning.

In this hands-on workshop participants will experience the curricula from three NSF funded projects, which engage youth in creating art with and about AI technologies while exploring related ethical concerns.

In this experience report, we describe an AI summer workshop designed to prepare middle school students to become informed citizens and critical consumers of AI technology and to develop their foundational knowledge and skills to support future endeavors as AI-empowered workers. The workshop featured the 30-hour "Developing AI Literacy" or DAILy curriculum that is grounded in literature on child development, ethics education, and career development. The participants in the workshop were students between the ages of 10 and 14; 87% were from underrepresented groups in STEM and Computing. In this paper we describe the online curriculum, its implementation during synchronous online workshop sessions in summer of 2020, and preliminary findings on student outcomes. We reflect on the successes and lessons we learned in terms of supporting students' engagement and conceptual learning of AI, shifting attitudes toward AI, and fostering conceptions of future selves as AI-enabled workers. We conclude with discussions of the affordances and barriers to bringing AI education to students from underrepresented groups in STEM and Computing.

We challenge a common assumption in active learning, that a list-based interface populated by informative samples provides for efficient and effective data annotation.We show how a 2D scatterplot populated with diverse and representative samples can yield improved models given the same time budget.We consider this for bootstrapping-based information extraction, in particular named entity classification, where human and machine jointly label data.To enable effective data annotation in a scatterplot, we have developed an embeddingbased bootstrapping model that learns the distributional similarity of entities through the patterns that match them in a large data corpus, while being discriminative with respect to human-labeled and machine-promoted entities.We conducted a user study to assess the effectiveness of these different interfaces, and analyze bootstrapping performance in terms of human labeling accuracy, label quantity, and labeling consensus across multiple users.Our results suggest that supervision acquired from the scatterplot interface, despite being noisier, yields improvements in classification performance compared with the list interface, due to a larger quantity of supervision acquired.