Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Using Intelligent Conversational Agents to Empower Adolescents to be Resilient Against Cybergrooming

Cybergrooming has emerged as a serious social concern, where perpetrators exploit the trust and emotional bond with youth through the internet for sexual exploitation or abuse. This project aims to address this issue by developing a technology-enhanced educational program to teach youth how to effectively protect themselves from online sexual predation. The novel contribution of this research is in the design and development of a conversational agent (i.e., chatbot) that teens interact with to practice (i.e., “learning-by-doing”) how to respond in ways that make them less vulnerable to cybergrooming advances. The conversational agent provides interactive coaching so that teens can understand responses that increase or decrease their vulnerability to sexual exploitation and explain why. The team is collecting examples of conversational data from parents and teens to train the conversational agent and uses natural language processing, to develop the chatbot. The research team works with teens and experts to conceptualize and design features to customize the interface of the chatbot and builds an educational program. The team partners with experts in cyber abuse and sex trafficking prevention to develop training materials and ensure that the conversational agent is safe for teens. This project research outcome will help the public understand how artificial intelligence can promote online safety. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.