CyCLOPS: Cypriot youth and online Content Looking beyond the single Perspective in information access Systems
About the Project
The CyCLOPS project — “Cypriot youth and online Content: Looking beyond the single Perspective in information access Systems” — will develop a lesson plan and an interactive tool to encourage Cypriot youth’s critical consumption of online information, by raising awareness about algorithmic processes that filter and sort content.
The project is hosted at and funded by CYENS Centre of Excellence, where it is led by the Transparency in Algorithms Multidisciplinary Research Group, specialized in algorithmic Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics research as well as demo development. The external partners are the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) and the Open University of Cyprus, who bring peace education and historical dialogue expertise into the team. The project will run for approximately 10 months, February – December 2022.
Project Lead
Our Audiences
The lesson plan will be developed for and used/evaluated with youth (teenagers). We will specifically be testing with a balanced, mixed group of Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking Cypriots, where the lesson plan will encourage critical thinking about how the online content managed by algorithms may represent and impact the Cyprus context.
A portion of the lesson plan and a static version of the tool will be available publicly online at the end of 2022. It is our hope that these resources will be used in teacher trainings, and subsequently by teachers themselves.
The Lesson (Plan)
The lesson plan will be developed to not only be followed in the 3-hour session we will hold with students in October 2022, but a version of it will also be released publicly along with the demo tool to be implemented by anyone interested. The session, where we will evaluate both the lesson plan and the demo, will involve four teachers and 28 students in an even mix of Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking Cypriots.
The lesson plan will be developed by our partners Loizos Loukaidis and Ümran Avni at the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR), and Prof. Michalinos Zembylas the Open University of Cyprus, who bring their invaluable expertise in peace education and historical dialogue.
Our Audiences
The lesson plan will be developed for and used/evaluated with youth (teenagers). We will specifically be testing with a balanced, mixed group of Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking Cypriots, where the lesson plan will encourage critical thinking about how the online content managed by algorithms may represent and impact the Cyprus context.
A portion of the lesson plan and a static version of the tool will be available publicly online at the end of 2022. It is our hope that these resources will be used in teacher trainings, and subsequently by teachers themselves.
The Interactive Tool
The tool will make use of two demos that were previously developed at the Transparency in Algorithms Multidisciplinary Research Group (TAG) at CYENS meant not only to help awareness-raising, but also to conduct research on the awareness of and behaviors around algorithms in information access systems. One of the demos focuses on social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram) while the other focuses on search engines (e.g. Google).
The two demo pilots (below), designed by the project’s Principal Investigator Pınar Barlas in collaboration with the rest of the TAG team, were developed by Antrea Chrysanthou. These demos will be combined and further improved to create the final interactive tool to be used in the evaluation sessions in CyCLOPS in October 2022. Pınar Barlas will design the tool, while a yet-to-be-hired engineer will develop the tool over the summer. (Are you interested? More information here!)
The Search Engine Demo
This demo gives the user the option to search for a particular topic (out of a list of topics available), then upon seeing the results, the option to search for the same topic in other manners or with another ‘account’. So, the user can see how the search results change based on the language or wording of the query (e.g. Kıbrıs vs. Κύπρος, scientist vs. woman scientist) as well as the impact of the user’s profile (e.g. age, gender, location) on the results chosen.
Antrea Chrysanthou, Pınar Barlas, Kyriakos Kyriakou, Styliani Kleanthous, and Jahna Otterbacher. 2020. Bursting the Bubble: Tool for Awareness and Research about Overpersonalization in Information Access Systems. In Proceedings of the 25th Int. Conf. on Intelligent User Interfaces Companion (IUI '20). https://doi.org/10.1145/3379336.3381863
The Social Media Demo
This demo presents the user with a social media homepage with posts about particular topics (e.g. Nuclear Energy, GMOs) and asks the user to “like” posts or comments that they agree with. Upon interacting with a post/comment, more posts that match that topic and point of view (e.g. supporting Nuclear Energy) are loaded, in a feedback loop that leaves out other points of view and other topics.
Pınar Barlas, Kyriakos Kyriakou, Antrea Chrysanthou, Styliani Kleanthous, and Jahna Otterbacher. 2020. OPIAS: Over-Personalization in Information Access Systems. In Adjunct Publication of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP '20 Adjunct). https://doi.org/10.1145/3386392.3397607
Interested to Collaborate?
Contact us and we will get back as soon as possible to discuss the details.