The dinner-time conversation has continued for months now. Your pre-teen wants a cell phone. All of her friends have one, and she feels left out. You and your partner have been discussing the possibility and are close to a purchase decision. Still, one major stumbling block remains: how to protect your child from harm in our increasingly connected metaverse. You trust your child and do not want to spy on them. After all, the middle and high school years are a time for growth and exploration. At the same time, the potential for emotional, psychological, and physical harm that originates via internet communication is real. Every day there is a report about human trafficking, school shootings, or teen suicide due to cyberbullying. How can you keep your child safe while still protecting their privacy?

We are leveraging machine learning technologies to develop a new kind of parental control app that will alert parents in cases of imminent harm while preserving the child’s privacy. We developed the proven technology that forms the foundation of the SKAMP machine learning algorithm with a close analysis of the communicative patterns of teens and tweens. SKAMP can achieve accuracy rates of over 80% for sexual predation and can filter out more than 95% of harmless content.

Importantly, we respect your privacy and that of your child. The SKAMP app runs a lightweight algorithm on your child's phone. When the algorithm detects a problem, it will send only the portions of the conversation that triggered our proprietary alert system to the parent via secure channels. Parents can flag alerts as useful or non-useful on a per-child basis, so you can customize the algorithm to reflect your family's values. Your data will never to sent to a third-party website for processing or storage.

Many organizations and agencies, especially federal agencies, that award large grants to academic institutions require oversight by an external evaluation consultant. During an evaluation project, the E-2 evaluation team, led by Dr. April Edwards, Ph.D., assists project leadership and administration with developing, refining, implementing, and reporting on project outcomes. We prefer to be involved as early in the process as possible, and we will assist with developing the evaluation plan in the proposal development stage. We have served as external evaluation consultants for multiple National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Education programs.

We can customize technical solutions for you. For instance, an educational support company hired us to develop an alert system for students experiencing problems with classmates. Dr. Edwards' over 20 years of experience in text mining and machine learning technologies gives you the experience you need to get the job done. We encourage partnering with other organizations for individually-tailored solutions to solve social issues that affect all of us.