Almost weekly, Brian Levine, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is asked the same question by his 14-year-old daughter: Can I download this app?Mr. Levine responds by scanning hundreds of customer reviews in the App Store for allegations of harassment or child sexual abuse. The manual and arbitrary process has made him wonder why more resources aren’t available to help parents make quick decisions about apps.Over the past two years, Mr. Levine has sought to help parents by designing a computational model that assesses customers’ reviews of social apps. Using artificial intelligence to evaluate the context of reviews with words such as “child porn” or “pedo,” he and a team of researchers have built a searchable website called the App …
