Kathleen O’Connell was born on 5 October 1888 at Caherdaniel, Co. Kerry, one of eleven children of John O’Connell, farmer, and Mary Ann O’Connell (née O’Sullivan). Educated locally, she emigrated to America in 1904 and trained as a secretary in Chicago. In 1912 she became secretary to the American delegation of the Gaelic League in New York. In response to news of the Easter rising she joined Cumann na mBan in the US and became active in collecting aid for the dependants of the men killed and wounded.
On 2 October 1919 she was requested by Éamon de Valera to join the ‘consular staff’ of his tour of America. Throughout the tour she worked closely with him, travelling the country dealing with his public and private correspondence and assisting with his speeches. Returning to Ireland with de Valera in November 1920, she immediately went into hiding. Arrested with de Valera on 22 June 1921, they were released the following day. She joined the delegation to meet Lloyd George in July 1921 and was later to share de Valera’s views of the treaty.
She followed de Valera loyally throughout the civil war and was present on the platform in Ennis at his arrest in August 1923. During his imprisonment she acted as his agent and messenger throughout the country. Devoted to the cause of Ireland, she identified service to the nation with service to de Valera.
Through opposition and government she was a constant at de Valera’s side, both nationally and internationally. Forced to retire in 1954 because of a cancer-related illness, her position was taken by her niece Maire O’Kelly. She died 7 April 1956 and was buried at Glasnevin cemetery.
The Kathleen O’Connell papers in UCD Archives relate overwhelmingly to O’Connell’s association with Eamon de Valera. However, the papers also include a series of photographs spanning over forty years from 1912–1956. O’Connell was well travelled and the collection includes images from her travels both in Ireland and throughout Europe. The first photograph below is dated July 1931, taken by Kathleen O’Connell while holidaying in Bruge, Belgium, with the author Annie M.P. Smithson. The scene is of a cobbled square, tall buildings at back, a man leading a large dog pulling a small cart to the front. An annotation in Kathleen’s hand records that she sent the photograph to the Irish Independent which published it and gave her 10/-. The second photograph is of O’Connell herself, taken during her final holiday in Caherdaniel, Co. Kerry before her death. She is in the hills above the village, sitting looking directly at the camera, with the sea visible in the background.
UCDA P155/242, 282 Papers of Kathleen O’Connell, photographs taken in Bruge, Belgium and Caherdaniel, Co. Kerry.
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images
New research is pulling back the curtain on how large numbers of kids are using AI companion apps — and what it found is troubling.
A new report conducted by the digital security company Aura found that a significant percentage of kids who turn to AI for companionship are engaging in violent roleplays — and that violence, which can include sexual violence, drove more engagement than any other topic kids engaged with.
Drawing from anonymized data gathered from the online activity of roughly 3,000 children aged five to 17 whose parents use Aura’s parental control tool, as well as additional survey data from Aura and Talker Research, the security firm found that 42 percent of minors turned to AI specifically for companionship, or conversations designed to mimic lifelike social interactions or roleplay scenarios. Conversations across nearly 90 different chatbot services, from prominent companies like Character.AI to more obscure companion platforms, were included in the analysis.
Of that 42 percent of kids turning to chatbots for companionship, 37 percent engaged in conversations that depicted violence, which the researchers defined as interactions involving “themes of physical violence, aggression, harm, or coercion” — that includes sexual or non-sexual coercion, the researchers clarified — as well as “descriptions of fighting, killing, torture, or non-consensual acts.”
Half of these violent conversations, the research found, included themes of sexual violence. The report added that minors engaging with AI companions in conversations about violence wrote over a thousand words per day, signaling that violence appears to be a powerful driver of engagement, the researchers argue.
“We have a pretty big issue on our hands that I think we don’t fully understand the scope of,” Dr. Scott Kollins, a clinical psychologist and Aura’s chief medical officer, told Futurism of the research’s findings, “both in terms of just the volume, the number of platforms, that kids are getting involved in — and also, obviously, the content.”
“These things are commanding so much more of our kids’ attention than I think we realize or recognize,” Kollins added. “We need to monitor and be aware of this.”
One striking finding was that instances of violent conversations with companion bots peaked at an extremely young age: the group most likely to engage in this kind of content were 11-year-olds, for whom a staggering 44 percent of interactions took violent turns.
Sexual and romantic roleplay, meanwhile, also peaked in middle school-aged youths, with 63 percent of 13-year-olds’ conversations revealing flirty, affectionate, or explicitly sexual roleplay.
That the interactions flagged by Aura weren’t relegated to a small handful of recognizable services is important. The AI industry is essentially unregulated, which has placed the burden for the well-being of kids heavily on the shoulders of parents.According to Kollins, Aura has so far identified over 250 different “conversational chatbot apps and platforms” populating app stores, which generally require that kids simply tick a box claiming that they’re 13 to gain entry. To that end, there are no federal laws defining specific safety thresholds that AI platforms, companion apps included, are required to meet before they’re labeled safe for minors. And where one companion app might move to make some changes — Character.AI, for instance, recently banned minor users from engaging in “open-ended” chats with the site’s countless human-like AI personas — another one can just as easily crop up to take its place as a low-guardrail alternative.
In other words, in this digital Wild West, the barrier for entry is extraordinarily shallow.
To be sure, depictions of brutality and sexual violence, in addition to other types of inappropriate or disturbing content, have existed on the web for a long time, and a lot of kids have found ways to access them. There’s also research to show that many young people are learning to draw some healthy boundaries around conversational AI services, including companion-style bots.
Other kids, though, aren’tdeveloping these same boundaries. Chatbots, as researchers continue to emphasize, are interactive by nature, meaning that developing young users are part of the narrative — as opposed to more passive viewers of content that runs the gamut from inappropriate to alarming. It’s unclear what, exactly, the outcome of engaging with this new medium will mean for young people writ large. But for some teens, their families argue, the outcome has been deadly.
“We’ve got to at least be clear-eyed about understanding that our kids are engaging with these things, and they are learning rules of engagement,” Kollins told Futurism. “They’re learning ways of interacting with others with a computer — with a bot. And we don’t know what the implications of that are, but we need to be able to define that, so that we can start to research that and understand it.”
I’m a senior staff writer at Futurism, investigating how the rise of artificial intelligence is impacting the media, internet, and information ecosystems.
Hangzhou is the latest city in China to take traffic control to a new level, rolling out a new AI-powered robot police officer to direct vehicles and pedestrians at a major intersection and issue polite warnings to law-breakers.https://www.youtube.com/embed/vvDyxYAQiyQ?enablejsapi=1
Robot Traffic Officer Goes on Duty in China’s Zhejiang
This 1.8-m-tall (5-ft 11-in) humanoid traffic cop – Hangxing No. 1 – has made quite an impression so far at the busy Binsheng Road and Changhe Road intersection in Binjiang District, where it’s directing buses, cars and bikes, spotting violations and issuing verbal warnings. It sports high-definition cameras and sensors, can blow a whistle and is integrated with the intersection’s traffic signal system to respond to light changes.
Good to see the new recruit is staying sun-smart, too
While it’s so far designed to be an adjunct to existing human officers, rather than a replacement, police department officials have plans to upgrade it with large language model (LLM) capabilities that will enable it to offer directions and have more engagement with people using the road. Right now, it performs the standard “stop” and “go” motions to oncoming traffic and can identify riders without helmets, jaywalkers and intersection rule-breakers.
Hangxing No. 1 moves around on omnidirectional wheels and is synced-up to the traffic light system
Hangxing No. 1 took up its post at the start of December, as part of the Hangzhou Traffic Police Tactical Unit’s pilot program of robot officers, and has so far proved especially popular with pedestrians.
It’s not the first robocop patrolling Chinese streets, with EngineAI’s PM01 model also donning the hi-vis uniform to help out on Shenzhen streets in and Logan Technology’s RT-G spherical bot quite literally rolled out in Wenzhou last December. And in June, Chengdu got its own humanoid traffic-cop to help out on the western city’s busy streets.
One of China’s earlier robocops, the PM01
All we can say is the technology has come a long way since the AnBot went on duty at the Shenzhen airport in September 2016. That model – which resembled a Dalek crossed with a bar fridge – was, of course, cutting-edge at the time. Given the rapidly moving pace of robotics development, we imagine this new Hangxing No. 1 model may also look obsolete in not nine years but one or two.
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