This paper presents findings from a thinking-aloud protocol exploring mental models in 28 elementary school math teachers during their initial attempt at composing and testing trigger-action rules for a smart tangible educational device. In the study, two sets of event-driven primitives were implemented in an End-User Development platform for guiding teachers with no programming experience in defining new functions of the device: "concrete", based on actual actions performed on the device, and "abstract", based on general definitions of events/actions. With a thematic analysis, we identified three different metaphors that drive participants’ interaction with the device. We discuss how the metaphors influenced performance and how the order of exposition to the two primitive sets impacted their grasping of the trigger-action logic. Our findings suggest the importance of guiding teachers in assuming effective metaphors for performing End-User Development tasks, to empower them to adopt an active role toward digital devices in education.

Integrated Development Environments increasingly implement AI-powered code completion tools (CCTs), which promise to enhance developer efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. However, interaction challenges with CCTs persist, mainly due to mismatches between developers’ mental models and the unpredictable behavior of AI-generated suggestions, which is an aspect underexplored in the literature. We conducted an elicitation study with 56 developers using co-design workshops to elicit their mental models when interacting with CCTs. Different important findings that might drive the interaction design with CCTs emerged. For example, developers expressed diverse preferences on when and how code suggestions should be triggered (proactive, manual, hybrid), where and how they are displayed (inline, sidebar, popup, chatbot), as well as the level of detail. It also emerged that developers need to be supported by customization of activation timing, display modality, suggestion granularity, and explanation content, to better fit the CCT to their preferences. To demonstrate the feasibility of these and the other guidelines that emerged during the study, we developed ATHENA, a proof-of-concept CCT that dynamically adapts to developers’ coding preferences and environments, ensuring seamless integration into diverse workflows. • Users want flexible triggers: balance control with smart automation • Inline works for short code; sidebar/chatbot for longer suggestions • Start minimal, let users expand from single lines to full files • Keep explanations short, contextual, opened by click or shortcut • Let users tune timing, style, detail level, and coding format

Abstract The rapid growth in interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a significant driver of research and business activities in recent years. This raises new critical issues, particularly concerning interaction with AI systems. This article first presents a survey that identifies the primary issues addressed in Human-Centered AI (HCAI), focusing on the interaction with AI systems. The survey outcomes permit to clarify disciplines, concepts, and terms around HCAI, solutions to design and evaluate HCAI systems, and the emerging challenges; these are all discussed with the aim of supporting researchers in identifying more pertinent approaches to create HCAI systems. Another main finding emerging from the survey is the need to create Symbiotic AI (SAI) systems. Definitions of both HCAI systems and SAI systems are provided. To illustrate and frame SAI more clearly, we focus on medical applications, discussing two case studies of SAI systems.

Phishing is one of the most prolific cybercriminal activities, with attacks becoming increasingly sophisticated. It is, therefore, imperative to explore novel technologies to improve user protection across both technical and human dimensions. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer significant promise for text processing in various domains, but their use for defense against phishing attacks still remains scarcely explored. In this paper, we present APOLLO, a tool based on OpenAI’s GPT-4o to detect phishing emails and generate explanation messages to users about why a specific email is dangerous, thus improving their decision-making capabilities. We have evaluated the performance of APOLLO in classifying phishing emails; the results show that GPT-4o has exemplary capabilities in classifying phishing emails (97% accuracy) and that this performance can be further improved by integrating data from third-party services, resulting in a near-perfect classification rate (99% accuracy). To assess the perception of the explanations generated by this tool, we also conducted a study with 20 participants, comparing four different explanations presented as phishing warnings. We compared the LLM-generated explanations to four baselines: a manually crafted warning, and warnings from Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers. The results show that not only the LLM-generated explanations were perceived as high quality, but also that they can be more understandable, interesting, and trustworthy than the baselines. These findings suggest that using LLMs as a defense against phishing is a very promising approach, with APOLLO representing a proof of concept in this research direction.

Today, the pervasive influence of technology has created significant cybersecurity challenges, exacerbated by human error that is often overlooked in system design. Reports show that up to 95% of cyber attacks are due to human factors, such as susceptibility to phishing and lax software maintenance. Italian public administrations (PAs) face heightened cyber risks due to underinvestment compared to the private sector. To address these challenges, the DAMOCLES research project provides a tailored framework focusing on Human Vulnerability Assessment (HVA) and Human Vulnerability Mitigation (HVM). HVA activities include behavior-based assessments and controlled cyber-attack testing using Digital Twins (DT) to mirror user behavior. HVM uses insights from HVA to develop customized training programs, supported by non-coding approaches for easy adoption. DAMOCLES aims to improve cybersecurity in Italian government agencies by effectively addressing human-related security vulnerabilities.

Assessing human vulnerability in cybersecurity is critical to understanding the relationship between human factors and the security of digital systems. This issue is exacerbated in areas such as public administration due to the sensitive nature of the data and services handled by government agencies, including citizen records, financial data, and national security details. Robust cybersecurity measures and understanding the human factors contributing to incidents are essential to securing public administration systems and maintaining public trust in government institutions. This poster presents ongoing work to develop a new psychometric tool to assess the human factors that play a critical role in cybersecurity incidents.

This article explores Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) in medical cytology, with a focus on enhancing the interaction with AI. It presents a Human-AI interaction paradigm that emphasizes explainability and user control of AI systems. It is an iterative negotiation process based on three interaction strategies aimed to (i) elaborate the system outcomes through iterative steps (Iterative Exploration), (ii) explain the AI system's behavior or decisions (Clarification), and (iii) allow non-expert users to trigger simple retraining of the AI model (Reconfiguration). This interaction paradigm is exploited in the redesign of an existing AI-based tool for microscopic analysis of the nasal mucosa. The resulting tool is tested with rhinocytologists. The article discusses the analysis of the results of the conducted evaluation and outlines lessons learned that are relevant for AI in medicine.

Companies and organizations involved in software development are stimulated and often obliged to consider procedures and technical solutions to guarantee data privacy and protection from the early phases of the software lifecycle. In addition, by default, personal data might be processed with the highest privacy protection level. These two requirements are Privacy by Design and Privacy by Default principles. Their importance has grown quickly in the last few years, as demonstrated by data protection regulations, like GDPR and PIPEDA, which include them as an important part of some of their articles. However, such regulations do not provide any practical or concrete indications of software requirements, and developers often lack adequate knowledge to understand the privacy prescriptions expressed in legal language. This study addresses these limitations by presenting a systematic and rigorous literature review that aims to answer the following research questions: (RQ1) How do Privacy-By-Design and Privacy-By-Default principles translate into software requirements? and (RQ2) How Privacy-By-Design and Privacy-By-Default principles integrate into a Human-Centred Design process? For RQ1, the analysis of the resulting publications led to identifying several software requirements and business processes organized along 8 data-oriented and process-oriented privacy design strategies. For RQ2, the analysis of the retrieved publications provided a comprehensive view of the HCI methodologies adopted to comply with privacy requirements identified current shortcomings, and proposed future research directions. The results have been distilled into an initial framework that may aid the development of software that must comply with such principles and aims to integrate them into an HCD process.

Remote usability testing is performed by evaluators who are in different physical locations from the participants (synchronous remote testing) and possibly operating at different times (asynchronous remote testing). The tools developed in recent years to support remote tests exploit web technology based on HTML5 and JavaScript ES6 and thus enable previously unexplored scenarios. However, studies providing evidence on the benefits or drawbacks of utilizing recent web-based tools have not yet been reported in the literature. This article sheds some light on the impact of such tools on asynchronous remote usability testing of websites by reporting an experimental study with 100 participants and 15 evaluators to compare real-time laboratory tests with asynchronous remote tests. The study investigates: 1) how the metrics results of asynchronous remote usability tests performed through a web-based tool differ from those of usability tests conducted in real-time laboratory settings; and 2) how the experience of participants differs in the two types of tests. The lessons learned in the study are instrumental in informing the design of future tools. Some results of particular interest indicate that the web technology used by the tool for asynchronous remote testing affects task execution times and participants’ satisfaction. Another indication is that slow internet connections must be managed in asynchronous remote testing; slow connections introduce delays when transferring large amounts of collected data, which, together with the lack of human support, make participants of asynchronous remote tests more prone to feel negative emotions.

This paper presents a pilot study for an initial assessment of a tangible tool to support end-user programming (EUP) by teachers to facilitate learning mathematics in primary school. The study aimed to explore teachers’ reasoning strategies and mental representations during trigger-action rules composition. The pilot study provided initial insight into the strengths and weaknesses of this approach and useful hints for designing a larger and more robust study

In this paper, we present the preliminary implementation of SMARTER, a tangible tool for supporting children in learning the basics of mathematics, which has been loosely inspired by the Cuisenaire rods. The tool exploits the power of tangible manipulation offered by physical materials coupled with the possibility of providing contextual and engaging feedback provided by digital tools. An original and important goal of the SMARTER tool is to allow teachers to fully customize the experience of use by exploiting end-user development.

This demo presents SERENE, a Web platform for the UX semi-automatic evaluation of websites. It exploits Artificial Intelligence to predict visitors’ emotions starting from their interaction logs. The predicted emotions are shown by interactive heatmaps overlapped to the webpage to be analyzed. The concentration of negative emotions in a specific area of the webpage can help the UX experts identify UX problems.

Privacy is becoming an increasingly important factor in software production. Indeed, besides increasing software quality, privacy is a mandatory aspect of national and supranational regulations like GDPR. However, several aspects like lack of knowledge on privacy and data protection regulations ambiguities limit the adoption of proper privacy implementation mechanisms during the software lifecycle. To fill this gap, this paper presents a framework, MATERIALIST, which aims to guide developers in choosing privacy design patterns to be used during software development. In particular, this paper focuses on the selection of privacy design patterns starting from the GDPR requirements. In this way, what is currently prescribed by GDPR in a non-technical way becomes a practical solution that software developers can adopt during their work.

The Internet of Things is a pervasive technology widely adopted in several contexts ranging from smart homes to automotive cars. In this context, the End User Development is gaining momentum: different solutions support non-technical users to define the smart objects behavior to better satisfy their needs. This workshop aimed to stimulates participants in providing discussions in line with the workshop themes and goals, for example, user mental models, acceptance of EUD solutions, the role of AI in EUD tools, humanoid robots were discussed.

Smart Interactive Experiences (SIEs) are usage situations enabled by the Internet of Things that empower users to interact with the surrounding environment. The goal of our research is to define methodologies and software environments to support the design of SIEs; more specifically, we focus on design paradigms suitable for experts of given domains, who however might not be experts in technology. In this context, this paper discusses some trade-offs that we identified between six different dimensions that characterise the quality of software environments for SIE design. The trade-offs emerged from the analysis of data collected in an experimental study that compared three different design paradigms to understand in which measure each paradigm supports the creative process for SIE design. After reporting on the study procedure and the data analyses, the paper illustrates how the resulting trade-offs led us to identify alternatives for SIE design paradigms, and to structure on their basis a modular architecture of a software platform where the strengths of the three paradigms can be exploited flexibly, i.e. depending on the constraints and the requirements characterising specific design situations.

Abstract Automation in computing systems has always been considered a valuable solution to unburden the user. Internet of Things (IoT) technology best suits automation in different domains, such as home automation, retail, industry, and transportation, to name but a few. While these domains are strongly characterized by implicit user interaction, more recently, automation has been adopted also for the provision of interactive and immersive experiences that actively involve the users. IoT technology thus becomes the key for Smart Interactive Experiences (SIEs), i.e., immersive automated experiences created by orchestrating different devices to enable smart environments to fluidly react to the final users’ behavior. There are domains, e.g., cultural heritage, where these systems and the SIEs can support and provide several benefits. However, experts of such domains, while intrigued by the opportunity to induce SIEs, are facing tough challenges in their everyday work activities when they are required to automate and orchestrate IoT devices without the necessary coding skills. This paper presents a design approach that tries to overcome these difficulties thanks to the adoption of ontologies for defining Event-Condition-Action rules. More specifically, the approach enables domain experts to identify and specify properties of IoT devices through a user-defined semantics that, being closer to the domain experts’ background, facilitates them in automating the IoT devices behavior. We also present a study comparing three different interaction paradigms conceived to support the specification of user-defined semantics through a “transparent” use of ontologies. Based on the results of this study, we work out some lessons learned on how the proposed paradigms help domain experts express their semantics, which in turn facilitates the creation of interactive applications enabling SIEs.

In the framework of the AVI 2018 Conference, the interuniversity center ECONA has organized a thematic workshop on "Digital Interaction: where are we going?". Six contributions from the ECONA members investigate different perspectives around this thematic.

In recent years, smart objects are increasingly pervading the environments we live in. For HCI researchers, an important challenge is how non-technical users can establish the behavior of such devices. This poster presents a new technology implementing a tangible-programming paradigm, which allows non-programmers to synchronize the behavior of ecologies of smart objects, thus determining the creation and customization of smart environments.

Research on the Internet of Things (IoT) has devoted many efforts to technological aspects. Little social and practical benefits have emerged so far. IoT devices, so-called smart objects , are becoming even more pervasive and social, leading to the need to provide non-technical users with innovative interaction strategies for controlling their behavior. In other words, the opportunities offered by IoT can be amplified if new approaches are conceived to enable non-technical users to be directly involved in “composing” their smart objects by synchronizing their behavior. To fulfill this goal, this article introduces a model that includes new operators for defining rules combining multiple events and conditions exposed by smart objects, and for defining temporal and spatial constraints on rule activation. The article also presents the results of an elicitation study that was conducted to identify possible visual paradigms for expressing composition rules. Prototypes implementing the resulting visual paradigms were compared during a controlled experiment and the one that resulted most relevant for our goals was used in a study that involved home-automation experts. Finally, the article discusses some design implications that came out from the performed studies and presents the architecture of a platform supporting rule definition and execution.

Recent technology advances support the interconnection of smart objects, enabling their communication according to the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. IoT is promising important changes in our lives. The opportunities offered by such technologies can be amplified, by investigating new approaches that, thanks to high-level abstractions, can enable non-expert users to compose data and functionality of things, as well as the communication among them, by means of "natural" composition paradigm. Today, in fact, this is a prerogative almost always reserved to developers who, through the use of specific programming languages, provide pre-packaged solutions to users. The workshop aims at stressing the Human-Computer Interaction perspective, i.e., it acknowledges the importance of enabling even non-technical users to manipulate data and functionality of things in a simple and natural way.

The EFESTO platform allows the creation of interactive workspaces supporting end users in the exploration and seamless composition of heterogeneous data sources. By means of a visual paradigm implemented within a Web composition environment, the end users dynamically create "live" mashups where relevant information, extracted from different types of data sources including the Linked Open Data, and functions that can be performed on it can be flexibly shaped-up at runtime.

There is a huge and ever increasing amount of data sources available on the Web, which provide content through programmatic interfaces. Unfortunately, such data sources are accessible only through programming and therefore it is difficult for non-technical users to take advantage of such enormous data assets. The need therefore arises for paradigms to let laypeople, i.e., users without expertise in programming, explore and compose data sources. This paper discusses mechanisms for data source exploration and integration, which emerged from a study where laypeople were involved in discussions to gather their requirements about accessing and composing services. The paper also describes the prototypes that we defined to respond to the requirements highlighted by end users.

The evolution of communication technologies provides support to the collaboration of people that work in distributed teams. Group awareness is an important requirement for activity coordination, since understanding the activities of the others provides the context for the individual own activities and gives indications on how individual contributions are relevant to the team. This poster proposes a novel information visualization technique that aims at supporting awareness in distributed teams. Collaborative traces of team members are visualized in order to show which one is the most available and responsive.

Large interactive displays are increasingly used in public spaces. Yet, it is still a challenge to understand how people behave when faced with such displays in their real life, not only when they are used for entertainment (or advertising), but also when they mediate more purposeful tasks. Do people feel shy? Are they willing to interact? Are they satisfied with the services offered and will they come back to use them again? To answer such questions, these systems have to be evaluated in the field so as to understand their actual impact on users in the real life. This paper first introduces an initial evaluation framework, aimed at highlighting some of the variables involved in understanding the impact of large display installations. Then, it applies the framework to analyze users' behavior and their experience with a large display installed at an international conference. Results highlighted that people showed greater interest in those services that, despite a lower appeal, supported them in carrying out useful tasks.