Sumita Sharma

Tampere University | UTA · School of Information Sciences

Children increasingly use applications utilizing Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML). Given the propensity of such applications to propagate existing social, gender, and racial biases, it becomes imperative to consider designing and developing child-centered AI applications for children. Furthermore, children should have opportunitie...

Mobile applications have thoroughly pervaded the lives of today's children, who live and learn through and with them. However, limited research has been conducted on children designing such apps and not only using those designed by adults. Inviting children to design such apps is the focus of our study. Moreover, in contemporary society, it is emph...

As we push the boundaries of participatory design (PD) to empower children across the world, barriers to participation for those currently underserved require further attention. This includes neurodiverse individuals at special schools in India, whose day-to-day experiences are heavily influenced by the larger socio-cultural context of the schools...

2020 marks the beginning of a new era as the pandemic catapulted us into new digital and virtual ways of everyday life. As the world changes, we reimagine empowering, equitable, accessible, diverse, and inclusive digital futures, through a series of projects and workshops with a diverse set of participants - children in schools and Child Computer I...

There is a revitalized interest in power and politics around design and technology in the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) field. Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research community has also shown arousing interest towards the topic. However, despite this emerging interest, the CCI research community has remained quite silent about the potential of...

The past two decades have seen an increase in the amount of research in the CHI community from South Asia with a focus on designing for the unique and diverse socio-cultural, political, infrastructural, and geographical background of the region. However, the studies presented to the CHI community primarily focus on working with and unpacking the re...

The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging for Fab Labs and makerspaces where the use of digital fabrication machines and working with physical materials in collaboration with others are at the heart of the activities. We have been actively promoting children’s technology education both by training local teachers and by working with children themselves....

Society’s expectations and assistance for children with special needs is rooted in its cultural, societal, and political backdrop. Previous work on the role of culture on assistive or adaptive technology design for children with special needs identified a three-part framework: lifestyle, socio-technical infrastructure, and monetary and informationa...

Children of today have been surrounded by digital technology since their birth. However, children of today are not equally equipped for their technology rich future: various kinds of digital divides still prevail in the society and affect the young generation and their digital futures. Schools and education of children should undergo an extensive d...

There has been a growing awareness of Artificial Intelligence's (AI) inherent biases, limitations, and the challenges in overcoming them. As AI is integrated into to all things technical, there is a valid concern over its diversity, inclusiveness, and accessibility. However, questions such as what does it mean for AI to be inclusive, why is inclusi...

Understanding people's attitudes towards and uses of technology is an essential aspect of a successful design process. Ethnography is a proven method for acquiring this understanding. However, there are challenges to incorporating fieldwork, most notably the time factor, considered by some as the greatest barrier. This is especially true for many t...

CityCompass VR is a collaborative virtual language learning environment that utilizes interactive omnidirectional video (iODV) content. In the application, two remotely located users navigate through cityscapes in order to reach a common goal. One of the users takes the role of a tourist who needs to find a local attraction, and the other one acts...

We present our exploratory work on globally inclusive online collaboration for schoolchildren in India and Finland, using CityCompass, an online virtual navigational application for conversational language learning. User studies with Indian children, who collaborated with a Finnish researcher, showed several barriers towards communication and colla...

In this paper, we build a case for incorporating socio-technical aspirations of different stakeholders, e.g. parents, care-givers, and therapists, to motivate technology acceptance and adoption for children with autism. We base this on findings from two studies at a special school in New Delhi. First, with six children with autism, their parents an...

Our research focuses on facilitating access to cross-cultural collaborative applications for schoolchildren. In this paper, we present two user studies with students from an underprivileged region in Delhi. In the first study, we found that Indian students were hesitant when using the application as compared with Finnish students in a similar study...

Nine HCI researchers from different cultures, backgrounds, and nationalities came together for two hours to discuss the role of technology in the day-to-day life of nine parents and their children, from Dharavi. The stories shared varied from experiences of parents wanting their children to study more and play videos games less, to a point blank qu...

Tablet and phone technology has become ubiquitous in the lives of children across the world. Where children once played outside and once played with physical toys, many children now play with tablet and phone technology to an extent that is perceived by some to be a detriment to their health and well-being. The tablet or phone can be considered as...

Gesture interaction provides a multitude of benefits to individuals with developmental disabilities, from enhancing social, motor and cognitive skills to providing a safe and controlled environment for simulating real-world scenarios. As gesture-based applications gain ground in the special education domain, we study their potential in the Indian c...

Anganwadi workers [1] form the core of healthcare system for a large section of rural and semi-urban population in India. They provide care for newborn babies and play an important role in immunization programs, besides providing health related information to pregnant women. Traditionally these Anganwadi workers use paper based information leaflets...

Government and NGO schools catering to children from low-income urban environments are increasingly introducing technology in the Indian classroom. However, one of the challenges is convincing low-literate parents the potential benefits of technology in education. In this study, we aim to uncover the concerns and expectations of low-income low-lite...

Public display deployments are often subjected to various surprising and unwanted effects. These effects are frequently due to external factors properties and phenomena that are unrelated to the deployment. Therefore, we conducted a literature review within the public display domain to investigate the causes behind the reported issues. This work pr...

Gesture-based interaction provides a multitude of benefits to individuals with disabilities, for example, enhancing social, motor and cognitive skills. However, applications that encourage self-efficacy by promoting a life-skill through simulations of real world scenarios are largely missing. We explore the benefits of using a gesture-based applica...

Kirana is a gesture-based application that simulates purchasing experience at a local Indian grocery store. It provides individuals with developmental difficulties a safe and controlled environment to explore the processes of purchasing an item: namely, deciding items to buy (decision making), calculating costs and balance (mathematical skills), an...

Educational games for young children have boomed with the growing abundance of easy to use interfaces, especially on smartphones and tablets. In addition, most major gaming consoles boast of multimodal interaction, including the more novel and immersive gesture-based or bodily interaction; a concept proved by masses of consumers including young chi...

CityCompass promotes collaborative conversational language learning by means of way-findings tasks situated in panoramic views of a city. Two remotely located participants have to navigate these 360 city panoramas as a tourist or a guide, to arrive at a preassigned destination. The application supports three modes of interaction and immersion: trad...

Although process control rooms are advanced digital environments with a multitude of desktop and large displays, there still exists a gap between the interaction technologies being employed in pervasive displays used in other settings and those used in control rooms. Previous research on large displays is extensively geared towards investigating so...

There exists mounting evidence in favor of computer supported autism interventions at the individual level. However, the potential benefits of using computer supported collaboration to encourage social interactions between individuals with autism and typically developed individuals are underexplored, particularly in developing regions. We present a...

CityCompass supports conversational spoken language learning by means of way finding tasks. In CityCompass, two remotely located users, a tourist and a guide, collaboratively navigate in 360 degree panoramic views of a city, to reach a preassigned destination. Over one hundred and fifty students from schools in Germany, Finland and India have used...

Emerging learning technologies have largely neglected communities who stand to benefit the most: children from developing regions. These technologies provide a means of self-expression to children with autism who face severe social challenges, and a mechanism to collaborate socially with a typically developed individual. They can also inspire the i...

Emerging technologies have largely neglected the communities who stand to benefit the most: Indian women who are functionally illiterate, children with special needs and underprivileged children. Gesture-based technologies have the potential to(a) help overcome the literacy barriers faced by functionally illiterate Indian women from urban slums and...

We present a study of using embodied health information system for developing regions focusing on users not familiar with technology. We designed and developed a health information system with two gesture-based selection techniques: pointing to a screen and touching one's own body part. We evaluated the prototype in user study with 37 semi-literate...

Studying pervasive systems in the wild has recently gained significant interest. However, few methods exist that focus on the subjective of user experience of such systems rather than objective metrics, like performance and task success. Especially multimodal interaction in this context poses challenges to understanding how different input and outp...