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A new Supreme Court ruling will require police to have probable cause before using sweeping geofence warrants that rely on people’s personal location data to find criminals.
Police subpoena Apple, Google, and other tech companies for precious user location data using so-called “geofence warrants,” which can serve as a dragnet to catch a single criminal while implicating many others. The Supreme Court says this method is no longer an option without probable cause.
According to SCOTUSblog, breaking down the ruling, a geofence warrant meets the criteria of a “search” as defined by the Fourth Amendment. Simply put, this means that anyone included in a warrant must be there with a reason.
In short, dragnet-style searches with no suspects identified by other evidence will no longer be an option except in very specific circumstances.
That isn’t to say user location data is off-limits for law enforcement. A subpoena to Apple or Google with an individual’s identity that is reasonably suspected of a crime with evidence gathered from other sources remains legal and viable.
There’s also the option of using geofence warrants when tracking a group of criminals or trying to find associates of a known criminal. Of course, warrants will need to be provided on a case-by-case basis.
Previously, law enforcement would simply ask for the location data of everyone that was within an area for a select period of time even when a suspect wasn’t known. If you happened to be passing by, you could be implicated for no reason other than being there with a smartphone.
The Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 that this violates the Fourth Amendment.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information — even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.” In other words, suspects will have to be identified using other means.
According to Harvard Law Review, Google was served with more than 11,500 warrants across 2020 for sweeping geofence searches. With this ruling, that number will now be zero without cause for every individual affected by the search.
The reason the Supreme Court shared this ruling today is due to a case from 2019 involving a bank robbery. A man escaped with nearly $200,000 and the police had zero suspects. The “zero suspects” bit is key to the ruling.
A geofence warrant was sent to Google, and the company provided 19 accounts that were within 150 meters of the bank robbery spanning that hour. Law enforcement narrowed it down to 9 accounts and requested location information for 2 hours surrounding the robbery.
The results were narrowed to three individuals — one was a man named Okello Chatrie. The location data led police to a residence with nearly $100,000, a gun, and demand notes.
The individual was arrested and pled guilty. However, Chatrie still argued that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated. After two escalating appeals on opposite sides of the issue, the case was pushed up to the Supreme Court.
With Monday’s ruling, Chatrie’s case isn’t over. It is being passed back down to the Circuit Court to determine if the police had reason to access the location data.
Regardless of that outcome, know that your location data is protected by a constitutional right. Police will need more than “wrong place, wrong time” tactics to find suspects in the future.
Apple is now on the third round of its 26-gen operating system updates, including developer builds of its iOS 26.6 and others alongside some 26.5.2 releases.
Apple is in the phase of the year where it has two developer beta tracks running at the same time. While the main attention is on the 27-generation, it is also still building for its current-gen operating systems.
The third developer betas landed after the second, which were distributed on June 15. The first round came out on May 26.
At the same time, Apple has included some releases for:
When there are two developer beta tracks undergoing testing, the next-generation version will include feature changes while the current-gen track is more about performance and security.
The first iOS 26.6 beta build included a new feature for Contacts that notifies users if they reach the maximum of 20,000 blocked listings. There was also a security fix for Apple Maps.
AppleInsider and Apple strongly recommend that users don’t put beta operating systems or beta software onto their primary or “mission-critical” devices due to the potential for data loss and other issues. Ideally, they should retain backups of their data and try to use spare and secondary hardware for testing purposes.
The more risk-averse users should wait for public beta builds, which are more battle-hardened and less prone to errors.
Find any changes in the new builds? Reach out to us on X at @AppleInsider or @Andrew_OSU, or send Andrew an email at [email protected].
Your browser has been busy on your behalf. This week brought two reminders that Chrome can put things on your machine you never agreed to. One came from Google. One came from an impostor. Both used the same quiet machinery.
Chrome runs on billions of devices, which makes it one of the most powerful pieces of software on Earth. It also makes it a tempting place to slip something in. Two stories from the past few days show the consent problem from both ends.
Since at least April, Chrome has been quietly downloading Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device AI model, onto eligible laptops and desktops. The file is about 4GB. It arrives with no prompt, no notification, and no obvious off switch, CNET reported. Delete it, and Chrome fetches it again.
The model powers on-device features such as scam detection and writing help. The catch is that most people never asked for it and never knew it landed.
The clearest account comes from Alexander Hanff, a privacy researcher who writes as “That Privacy Guy”. He caught the install on a fresh Mac profile that had received zero human input, using the system’s own file-event log. The 4GB model unpacked itself in about 14 minutes while a tab sat idle, he wrote. He argues the silent push breaches Europe’s ePrivacy and data-protection rules, and that the bandwidth alone carries a heavy climate cost at billion-device scale.
Google says the model removes itself if a device runs short on space or power. The company also points out that, since February, users can turn it off in Chrome settings, after which it stops downloading.
There is a twist that muddies the trust further. The visible “AI Mode” pill in the address bar does not use the on-device model at all. Those queries go to Google’s servers. So the user pays the storage cost of a local model, while the headline AI feature still sends typing to the cloud.
The second story is darker, because the actor was not Google. Microsoft’s threat researchers found a malicious Chrome extension dressed up as the AI search engine Perplexity. It quietly logged what people searched for, then sent them on to real results so nothing looked wrong.
The extension, called “Search for perplexity ai”, used a look-alike domain to pass for the real thing, The Hacker News reported. Once installed, it made itself the default search engine. Every query, and every character typed into the address bar, went first to an attacker-controlled server, which logged it with your IP address and browser details.
The theft happened on that first hop, before the redirect. The extension abused Chrome’s network-rule permissions to pull it off, and shipped server code that logged every request, Microsoft said. Google removed it after the disclosure.
This was not a one-off. Microsoft earlier tied a wave of AI-branded extensions to roughly 900,000 installs across more than 20,000 company networks, harvesting ChatGPT and DeepSeek chat histories. The AI label gets the install. The permissions do the damage.
Put the two together and a pattern appears. The browser, and the address bar in particular, has become a trust surface that both vendors and attackers want to occupy. Google treats your disk as a delivery target for its own AI. A criminal treats your omnibox as a wiretap. The user sits in the middle, rarely asked.
That is the real story here, and it should worry anyone who cares about trust in everyday software. When a legitimate company normalises silent installs, it gets harder for users to spot the malware doing something similar. Consent stops being a habit. The line between a feature and an intrusion blurs.
It also lands at a moment when AI branding is a magnet. People associate AI tools with usefulness, so they click. Attackers know it, and the same instinct that makes us try a shiny new assistant makes us wave through malicious apps wearing the same costume.
A few minutes of housekeeping helps. On Chrome, open Settings, then System, and turn off on-device AI if you do not want the Gemini Nano model. You can also check for a folder named OptGuideOnDeviceModel in your Chrome profile to see whether the 4GB file is already there.
Then audit your extensions. Remove anything you do not recognise, check the publisher and the exact domain before installing AI-branded tools, and watch for a search engine that has quietly changed. None of this is hard. It is just the price of using a browser that, increasingly, acts on its own.
The deeper fix is not yours to make. It belongs to the company that decides whether the default browser asks before it acts. Until it does, the safest assumption is simple. Your privacy is your job, and the browser is not always on your side.
CISA confirmed on Monday that ransomware gangs have begun exploiting a high-severity Microsoft Defender privilege escalation vulnerability that has previously been abused in zero-day attacks.
Dubbed BlueHammer, the security flaw (CVE-2026-33825) was leaked by a security researcher known as “Nightmare Eclipse” in early April, together with proof-of-concept exploit code, in protest at how the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) handles the disclosure process.
“Insufficient granularity of access control in Microsoft Defender allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally,” Microsoft explains in a security advisory.
Will Dormann, principal vulnerability analyst at Tharros, told BleepingComputer in April that while the issue is not easy to exploit, it gives local attackers access to the Security Account Manager (SAM) database, which contains password hashes for local accounts.
With this access, they can escalate to SYSTEM privileges and potentially take complete control of the targeted system.
“At that point, [the attackers] basically own the system, and can do things like spawn a SYSTEM-privileged shell,” Dormann said.

Microsoft patched the vulnerability on April 14 as part of the April 2026 Patch Tuesday. However, days later, Huntress Labs security researchers revealed that threat actors had been exploiting it as a zero-day in attacks that showed evidence of “hands-on-keyboard threat actor activity.”
Over the past several months, Nightmare Eclipse has disclosed multiple other Windows zero-day exploits, including for the RoguePlanet, RedSun, GreenPlasma, MiniPlasma, YellowKey, and UnDefend flaws.
Some of these vulnerabilities affect Microsoft Defender, while others target BitLocker and Windows components.
Microsoft fixed the GreenPlasma, MiniPlasma, and YellowKey security flaws three weeks ago as part of the June 2026 Patch Tuesday updates.
CISA added the BlueHammer flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog on April 22, ordering Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to patch their Windows devices against ongoing CVE-2026-33825 attacks within two weeks, until May 7.
“This type of vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses significant risks to the federal enterprise,” the U.S. cybersecurity agency warned at the time.
While Microsoft has yet to tag this security flaw as exploited in attacks, CISA has now also flagged it as exploited in ransomware campaigns in a Monday update to its KEV Catalog.
In recent years, CISA has flagged eight Microsoft Defender vulnerabilities that have been exploited in attacks, with two of them also targeted by ransomware gangs.
Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
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Would you pay more for a home with a heat pump?
You can bet I would.
I’d gladly fork over more money to bypass a gas or oil furnace, which—unlike an all-electric heat pump—spews toxic combustion byproducts, runs the risk of poisoning my family with carbon monoxide, and contributes to climate change. And while heat pumps, which provide both heating and cooling, typically cost more up front than conventional furnaces, they’re two to four times as efficient, and so could save me money in the long run.
Apparently, I’m not alone in prizing the comfort, safety, and economic benefits of these appliances.
Heat pumps give home values a boost, according to a new report by the nonprofit Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative, which studies consumer behaviors, interests, and concerns in the energy transition; 257, a customer-intelligence platform that profiles US. residential property characteristics for contractors, utilities, and others; and the trade group the National Association of Realtors. Their analysis showed that homeowners who install a heat pump can recoup up to a quarter of its cost just by mentioning it in real estate listings when they’re ready to sell.
While some homeowners may invest in a heat pump for its environmental bona fides, for most people, economics trumps all, said Scott Rosenberg, a cofounder and chief executive officer of 257. “A homeowner who puts a garage on, redoes their bathroom, improves their kitchen, always thinks, ‘Am I going to get this value back?’”
By analyzing more than half a million sales of US homes with ducted heat pumps from 2024 to 2025, the authors found that those with real estate listings mentioning the heat pump typically enjoyed a sales price boost of 0.6 percent to 1 percent over homes that didn’t advertise their efficient appliance. This modest lift translates to $2,300 to $3,900 per home, given a median sale price of $399,000.
“Just shy of $4K doesn’t sound like a lot of money on a home sale,” Rosenberg said. “But it’s actually a meaningful piece of the investment that you made to get the heat pump in the first place.”
In 2026, a ducted heat-pump system costs on average about $15,400, per energy marketplace EnergySage—though prices vary wildly depending on the region, a home’s size and electrical service, and local contractors, to name a few variables. A comparable gas furnace plus central AC system can cost half that, according to home services platform Angi. Mentioning a home’s heat pump in the sale listing, assuming the appliance cost around the average price, can recoup about 15 percent to 25 percent of the outlay.
Now, every home is different, and people willingly pay premiums for a wide variety of attributes, such as the floor plan, the views, and neighborhood vibes.
But Rosenberg is confident that when it comes to real estate listings, the heat-pump price bump is real, because of the approach his team used and the amount of data they analyzed. 257 used a machine learning technique to cluster homes across hundreds of attributes to identify those that are nearly identical, he said. Then, within those clusters, sales prices were contrasted for those homes where the heat pump was or wasn’t mentioned in the listing.
Yueming “Lucy” Qiu, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, called the report “very valuable” for helping to gauge the premium that people place on heat pumps. “I’m actually very happy that this came out,” said Qiu, who investigated the matter years ago at a smaller geographic scale.
In 2020, Qiu and her colleagues published a peer-reviewed study in Nature Energy that looked at home sales across 23 states from 2000 to 2018 for whether the presence of a heat pump improved the property’s sale prices.
Sony’s next premium Walkman could be closer than expected as a fresh leak suggests the long-awaited NW-ZX900 is on track to launch in late 2026 or early 2027.
The latest details come from The Walkman Blog, which reports that the upcoming music player has already appeared on Sony’s internal servers.
While the listing doesn’t reveal new hardware, it lines up with an earlier benchmark leak. That benchmark hinted at a substantial performance jump over the current NW-ZX707.
According to the benchmark, Sony will replace the ageing Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS4290 platform, based on the Snapdragon 660, with a much newer chipset derived from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 3. The move would bring a far more modern CPU architecture. It would feature four Cortex-A720 performance cores alongside four Cortex-A520 efficiency cores.
On paper, that means more than double the performance of the NW-ZX707 – around a 122% increase based on benchmark estimates. Sony is also tipped to pair the chip with 8GB of RAM. As a result, the Walkman will be far better equipped to handle streaming apps, large music libraries and Android multitasking than its predecessor.
The newer 4nm manufacturing process should also improve efficiency. That could mean longer battery life despite the extra power, although Sony has yet to reveal any official battery figures.
Connectivity also looks set for an upgrade. The leaked specifications point to Wi-Fi 6E support. This allows faster downloads for high-resolution music and streaming apps compared to the older Wi-Fi standard used by the current model. Users would of course need a compatible router.
There are no details yet on changes to the display, DAC hardware, storage options or audio tuning. All these areas matter just as much to dedicated Walkman buyers.
Sony’s NW-A306 and NW-ZX707 both launched back in January 2023. The players have since disappeared from sale in several regions. If the leaks are accurate, the NW-ZX900 could finally be the long-awaited successor. It could bring a much-needed hardware refresh to Sony’s premium portable music player lineup.
Playground Games has confirmed that if Fable players, for some reason, decide to kill every non-player character (NPC) in a settlement, they will repopulate over time.
During a press Q&A at an Xbox event adjacent to this year’s Summer Game Fest (SGF) attended by TechRadar Gaming, associate game director Will Kennedy discussed Fable‘s reactive world, including the permanence of player actions. As a role-playing game (RPG), decisions will impact the NPCs around you, and players will have a reputation that will be remembered through their actions.
Player actions will also have consequences and be remembered, but if players decide to go on a killing spree, NPCs will later respawn through the game’s repopulation system.
In fact, Playground originally thought about letting players live with this decision; however, it ultimately decided that the absence of so many NPCs would spoil other systems.
“In terms of killing NPCs, you can kill every NPC in a settlement, and the settlement will stay empty for some time,” Kennedy explained. “But we do have a system that begins to repopulate in a settlement as well, but the reason that we do that is, we thought about it, there was a school of thought where you just live with that consequence literally forever, but we also thought in doing that it would cut off a lot of systems to players.
“It would be cool [at] first, but then it might actually get a bit annoying, so we may make the choice to prevent that.”
We followed up with Playground Games after the event and received the following from game director and general manager of Playground Games, Ralph Fulton, on how repopulation will work: “The new NPCs who, over time, repopulate a settlement to replace NPCs who have sadly died (i.e., were killed by you…) will be full NPCs like the ones they’re replacing. They’ll have all the elements that all our Living Population NPCs have – name, job, traits, home, clothing, appearance and yes, voice – and will be fully functional in all the same ways.
In the same Xbox event interview, Fulton revealed that Fable will feature over 150,000 lines of dialogue, and over 1000 hours of voice-over were recorded this year alone.
“We’ve had multiple studios set up running in parallel for over 1000 hours just this year alone, just recording VO,” he said, “so it’s a huge machine, because the vision that the guys have for this part of the game just requires that way of writing.”
Fable will officially launch on February 23, 2027, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, and PC.
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Taiwan raided Super Micro’s office and two affiliated companies as it widens its first criminal probe into Nvidia chip smuggling to China.
Taiwan’s Keelung District Prosecutors Office raided Super Micro Computer’s local office on Monday, widening an investigation into the alleged smuggling of Nvidia chips to China through the company’s servers. The raid also targeted the residences of six individuals and the sites of two other affiliated companies, according to Bloomberg. Super Micro shares fell more than nine percent on the news.
Taiwanese data centre operator Chief Telecom and Super Micro distributor Albatron Technology were also searched, according to a person familiar with the investigation cited by Bloomberg. Albatron confirmed in an exchange filing that it had been searched but did not explain why. Chief Telecom did not immediately comment.
Super Micro said in a statement that it is working closely with Taiwanese authorities and remains committed to protecting its technology and intellectual property. The company said its products continued to be targeted in the smuggling cases and that it is cooperating with law enforcement in Taiwan and other jurisdictions. Super Micro itself has not been charged in the investigation.
The raid extends Taiwan’s first formal crackdown on AI chip diversion, which began in May when prosecutors detained three individuals accused of using forged documents to export Nvidia-equipped servers to China. The three suspects, including Super Micro co-founder Wally Liaw, allegedly routed at least one shipment through Japan before it reached the mainland. Around 50 servers were seized before they could leave the island.
Taiwan does not currently treat AI chip exports to China as a crime. Prosecutors have instead been charging suspected smugglers with violations of existing laws such as document forgery. Taipei is now considering criminalizing the exports themselves, which would give local prosecutors a more direct tool to pursue the illicit trade.
The case ties back to a broader scheme that US prosecutors have valued at roughly two and a half billion dollars. The US Department of Justice charged Super Micro co-founder Liaw and two others in March with conspiring to divert Nvidia-equipped servers to China through a front company in Southeast Asia, using heat guns to swap serial numbers and dummy servers to fool auditors. Liaw has pleaded not guilty, and the case is set for trial in November.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed the smuggling problem last week, telling shareholders that data centres built with diverted chips are a dead end because the company will not provide support or repairs. The raid on Monday suggests Taiwan is increasingly willing to enforce that message from its end, extending the investigation beyond the original suspects and into the companies that handled the hardware.
Most iPhone leaks are predictable. You’ll see a case show up or an early leak showcase the mold of the upcoming iPhones. But the leak this time around is a bigger deal, since it has basically just revealed the device as it’s being tested.
A new post from leaker Ice Universe claims to show the iPhone 18 Pro undergoing a drop test. The clip itself is short, but it gives us a proper look at an unreleased Pro iPhone in a controlled test environment. This reveals that it is durable enough to handle a basic fall, though the thickness is still surprising, and the weight is still unknown.
The drop-test clip appears tied to a much larger data leak involving Tata Electronics, one of Apple’s key manufacturing partners in India. Reuters reports that files posted on the dark web included iPhone 18 Pro supplier lists, component maps, and photos from drop tests at Tata facilities.
A leaked exterior photo can spoil a design, while supplier maps and component lists can reveal how the phone is built and who is building it. It can even reveal which companies are tied to key parts such as chips, batteries, and camera components. Just like the current iPhone 17 Pro models, the next-gen Pro iPhone also features the same three-camera layout and large camera island. The drop test is being performed on a gray color variant.

The claimed drop-test footage does not give us a proper spec sheet. But Apple’s Pro models are expected to get major internal upgrades, with the stolen Tata files mentioning logic board schematics, A20 Pro data sheets, and references to Apple’s C2 modem.
Though its clear that the iPhone 18 Pro isn’t the highlight this year. The big new thing is likely Apple’s first foldable iPhone, which could be called the iPhone Ultra.
Base44, the vibe coding platform that Wix acquired for $80 million just one year ago — when the company was barely six months old and had a team of eight — has started rolling out its own AI model to support its users in creating apps with natural language.
The move comes as the discussion in AI circles has intensified over whether frontier models are best suited for all use cases. A related question is whether businesses built on top of someone else’s models are truly defensible long-term. The latest move of Base44, based in Tel Aviv, speaks to both.
While its custom LLM is only just rolling out, Base44 hopes that it will eventually outperform frontier models. According to its founder, Maor Shlomo, “training and owning the model as part of [our] entire stack allows us a lot more optimizations on latency, cost, and efficiency.”
At first glance, this could be a way to stay ahead of competitors such as Swedish startup Lovable, which reached unicorn status in its Series A round last summer and that relies on external LLMs. However, Shlomo expects that others will train their own models — “at least the players that have gotten enough scale and velocity to have enough data.”
According to Jonathan Userovici, a general partner at VC firm Headline — whose portfolio includes AI companies like Mistral AI, but not Base44 — data is one of three key ingredients of defensibility for AI startups, alongside distribution and tech stack.
The upshot is that players with strong brands are now leaning into their data and infrastructure to increase their defensibility, and Base44 fits that pattern. The company says the first iteration of its LLM, Base1, was developed and trained on a dataset generated from “tens of millions of real user interactions on the platform.”
This dataset will keep on growing with the company; but so will its rivals’. The bigger competition may not be vibe-coding startups at all but instead come from frontier AI labs that are getting closer to Base44’s home turf — Cursor and Grok’s parent company xAI now both belong to SpaceX, and Claude Code has become a vibe coding player in its own right.
This gives Anthropic and other foundational AI providers access to data and feedback loops they can use to improve models for app creation, but Shlomo thinks specialization gives Base44 a leg up. “Models are progressing, but they’ll stay very general in what they can do,” he predicted.
Userovici, for his part, cautioned against underestimating frontier models, citing the example of the legal tech startup Harvey, which abandoned plans to train its own model. He doesn’t expect applied AI companies to become frontier labs en masse but frames Base44’s move in a broader context — one in which inference costs have become a meaningful part of the equation.
That cost pressure, Userovici says, has driven change that enterprise customers are now demanding. “They don’t necessarily see a [return on investment] when using the latest models for all use cases, so an entire infrastructure is being set up to do orchestration and optimization to select the right models for them so that costs don’t skyrocket while maintaining the same or similar performance across the majority of use cases.”
Enterprise companies still are a minority among the audience of the vibe coding platforms, but they represent a growing share of platform revenue, and users of all sizes are starting to express concerns over the cost of using AI. Base44’s decision to develop its own LLM stemmed from multiple factors, but cost reduction is likely among the benefits.
“We want to get a model that is going to be more aligned to what we think is the right thing, is going to be more optimized to what we see users like in terms of the results we’re getting, and is going to be faster and cheaper for customers eventually than using the frontier models like Opus,” Shlomo said.
As for Base44 itself, cost reduction isn’t as clear cut. In a press release, the company explained that “ownership of the model gives Base44 direct control over compute and inference spend, expected to result in a structurally stronger margin profile over time.”
Even with a delayed payoff, improved margins would be good news for Base44’s parent company, which recently announced it would lay off 20% of its workforce. In contrast, Base44 has been growing in headcount since the acquisition — and announced it had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue a few months ago.
That’s still less than Lovable, which said it hit $500 million in ARR earlier this month. But Shlomo is betting that the “huge engineering effort” to develop Base1 will cement Base44’s positioning as the “only vertically integrated vibe-coding application — meaning, in Userovici’s terms, a player that owns its distribution, data, and infrastructure all at once.
This article was updated to correct Base44’s location.
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As a parent, I would have readily paid for access to a tool that could draw from evidence-based ideas for my child’s specific challenges.
Michele Van Valey has had a rather unusual entry into science and research. She said she initially intended to begin a master’s degree following her bachelor’s in English, but instead “accidentally landed a waitressing job in the heart of a burgeoning music scene”.
She worked on several creative projects during this time, spanning music documentaries and indie record labels.
Later, her life turned towards yoga following some health issues. “I spent the next decade in more unconventional education studying the body – yoga therapy, Pilates, massage therapy, nutrition and meditation,” she says.
She returned to formal education with a masters in ‘mindfulness based interventions’ at University College Dublin (UCD) in 2019, which eventually evolved into another masters in counselling and psychotherapy at IICP.
Her masters dissertation led her to her current doctoral programme at UCD studying children’s mental health. She is also a psychotherapist by practice.
Growing up in California, I owned my first Stanford University sweatshirt by the time I was 8 years old. My father was a teacher and higher education was instilled in me from a very young age. I did not know what I wanted to do in college but I enjoyed words, stories and writing so I opted for an English degree.
Drawn to contemporary realism, I met the Shakespeare requirement reluctantly until Professor Corum shared his animated interpretation of the wind instruments in Othello.
Two hundred and fifty freshmen held their collective breath, rapt, as he described the bawdy possibilities. “Am I reaching?” he asked. The room exploded. And so, my interest in words evolved into an interest in language; framing, meaning, tension, subtext, and all that is not being said. Qualitative research fits well for me.
Years later, Professor Gardiner introduced me to the work of anthropologist, Maria Gimbutas and asked me to write a feminist take on Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women for my thesis (so much for contemporary realism). Crossing disciplines, mapping historical landscapes and the process of discovery lit me up. After four years, I was ready for a break in study but always knew I would be returning. Joining the research team at UCD is a lucky opportunity that feels a lot like home.
The PhD I’m working toward is a doctoral scholarship in child mental health and the digital age, supported by UCD Foundation through a charitable donation from Cycle Against Suicide.
It came about after my friends and I put together a series of events hosted by UCD called, Neuroconvergence, where we brought neurodivergent voices together as a way to learn from each other, play together and perhaps even move the policy needle.
Dr Blanaid Gavin participated on a panel with me and I shared the dissertation I had written with her. That was the lucky coincidence. I didn’t know that she was compiling a team of researchers to design digital tools for parents and families in need of support.
I had personal experience of long waitlists to access services and the expense of paying for them privately. I also knew that there were tens of thousands of parents in Facebook groups advising each other around how to support their children when there was little chance of accessing a professional. The idea of an evidence-based parenting tool that offered in the moment support to families waiting for professional access really appealed to me. It took me longer to warm to the AI piece.
My project will become an AI-enabled, adaptable parenting tool that can draw from various empirically evidenced, theoretical disciplines in the moment of need. A cursory look at the literature revealed that most clinical, AI informed applications rest on behaviourist interventions. The physiological responses which often fuel behaviour is where my area of interest lies. So, neurobiology and the relational sciences will be cantered in my design.
Despite my broad reservations about using AI (sycophant-y, Tech-lords, plagiarism and water consumption), I know it’s coming and my individual protest will have no impact. The literature on LLMs [large language models] suggests they are unreliable therapists without constraint or oversight, so designing and testing for safety and efficacy will be important.
Perhaps contributing to the growing body of research that calls for ethical guardrails is a more effective use of my voice. As Dario Amodei of Anthropic recently pointed out to Oprah, “we can’t stop the train but we can steer it”. I’m only a few months in, so the biggest evolution has been integrating my friend Claude into the team. There is a lot more to AI than chat and I have become enchanted by the possibilities. Let’s hope we keep the train from jumping track.
Parents are desperate for advice, especially when they have a child who is struggling in some way. Often the need is immediate, thus the success of Facebook groups for information sharing.
Someone is always there to offer ideas and solidarity. It’s a wonderful resource. Yet nearly every parent there is waiting on services because people want to hear from trained professionals when it comes to their child’s mental health.
Additionally, western culture leans heavily toward behaviourist approaches due to the large body of evidence that supports them. Many families have benefitted from helping a child face their difficulty to overcome it.
Sometimes, however, there is something systemic or traumatic prompting the behaviour that requires a different lens. Parents who are trying to help their children while waiting for professional support will benefit from access to a variety of empirically evidenced ideas to further their understanding of their child’s experience.
There are only a handful of parenting apps in the market that are supported by research, most of them behaviour focused. Very few, if any, integrate Interpersonal Neurobiology.
As a parent, I would have readily paid for access to a tool that could draw from evidence-based ideas for my child’s specific challenges.
Addressing thoughts and changing behaviours can be helpful. It is also possible that there may be other areas to investigate. Access to different ideas for effective, individual decision making will be invaluable to families.
Speed. The volume of information coming out about AI is relentless. Staying organised in my work and balancing that with my role as a parent is also top of mind.
I suppose people like myself will be worried about AI misuse, governance, plagiarism and climate concerns. It might sound like an oxymoron to create a relational AI tool, but what if it could help families access calm connection in difficult moments? What if tech brought us closer to understanding each other rather than pulling us in different directions? This feels worthy of investigation.
With respect to AI the field is moving fast. It’s actually hard to know how it will be researched at all unless AI is employed to speed things along. Gathering and analysing data takes years.
With respect to parenting, I hope that more families will learn about attachment needs, stress reactivity and coregulation. Every tier on my educational journey has taught me that healing is relational. The late Psychologist, John Welwood, even proposed that relationship is “the leading edge of human evolution at this time in history.” I’d love to see much more work in this area.
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