Transparent knowledge for decision support through artificial intelligence: Understanding the perception of children in Granada's school environments

Abstract

Recent socio-economic transformations are encouraging societies that aspire to more active decision-making roles, affecting social organizations, but also knowledge management and education. For this empowerment to occur, better and more equitable access to information, more transparent, understandable and interpretable, is needed. This work continues a Participation Research carried out with university students and other citizens. This research allowed consensus to be reached on attributes and indicators of the quality of life and urban sustainability. Research is now focused on trying to provide useful knowledge for citizen empowerment in decision-making. The urban school environments of the city of Granada are selected as a case study. The information is obtained by means of a quantitative methodology with forms to children on their family and residential dimensions, relationship with the environment and perceptive of the urban school environment. Using Artificial Intelligence techniques on the first three dimensions, profiles of children are obtained according to these realities. The profiles are contrasted with the perceptive dimension that children have of the environment close to their school, and finally represented in a comprehensible way for direct interpretation by citizens. It is concluded that the child's perception of the city is influenced by the family context and especially by the type of displacements it makes, being generally more positive when these are pedestrian. This is rooted in the relevance of ‘Children’s City’ ideas, which are more pedestrian and humane, legitimizing lines of critical citizen action.