Children’s Agency in the Age of AI: Leveraging Interdisciplinarity (CHAILD)
CHAILD is a UKRI-funded project investigating children’s and young people’s perceptions, uses, needs, and challenges with generative AI. It is where I currently work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, in a joint post between the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and the Institute of Education at University College London, supervised by Dr Jun Zhao and Professor Manolis Mavrikis.
As generative AI and synthetic media applications improve, people use them for more and more tasks. There is a fine line between gaining efficiency by using an application as a tool and ceding control to it by having it do the task for you. That line is especially hard to navigate for children and young people, who are still developing their own decision-making abilities and are usually also constrained – often for good reasons – by parents, teachers, and policymakers.
The question we work on is how AI systems and applications might be designed to support children and young people in making informed decisions and enacting them meaningfully: their agency.
The project is interdisciplinary by design, bringing together computer science, education, philosophy, and law. Alongside empirical studies with children and young people, we build prototype applications, run workshops with the research community, and work with teachers and policymakers.
I also lead a special issue of the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction on “Agency in Child-AI Interaction”, which grew out of the CAMCAD workshop our team ran at CHI 2026.
Hi 👋😊! I’m Vidminas (most people call me Vid), a postdoc on the CHAILD project splitting time between the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford and the Institute of Education, University College London.
I am interested in technology and education, and more specifically researching and developing technologies that empower people. The current CHAILD project focus is about defining and designing for agency in children and young people’s use of AI tools.
I completed my PhD at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh in March 2026, supervised by Professor Fiona McNeill and Professor Judy Robertson. The project was about better understanding and designing tools to help teachers search for educational resources.
I am always keen to chat about teaching and learning, human-computer interaction, participatory research, and designing applications for good, feel free to get in touch!