projects i love right now

The impact of screens and screen time on child cognitive and language development is one of my new obsessions. I struggle how to reconcile the extensive harms of screen use during early years with the reality that much of social and educational life takes place online.

I am keeping a close eye on the Digital Lives branch of the Nuffield Foundation's Grown Up project (in collaboration with the Ada Lovelace Institute) which seeks to understand the nuanced experiences of young people with digital technologies, beyond the binary focus on harms and opportunities.

I am fascinated by the way that attitudes to hormonal contraception are changing among my generation and younger women, especially the decline in use of hormonal contraception. The Policy Research Unit in Reproductive Health at UCL are undertaking a fantastic mixed-methods project to understand how women's attitudes and decisions are changing.

Automatic translation has been a mammoth challenge looming over the sign language research world for as long as I can remember. It was amazing (or jaw-dropping, to use my favourite sign) to see the launch of Sign GPT, a project building tools to allow spoken language to be automatically translated into sign language and vice versa. 

I'm so excited to see what the team produce, and to try out some of the open-source linguistic toolkits they are planning!