Typing on a smartwatch presents significant challenges due to several factors, including the small size of these devices, the lack of tactile feedback, and the fat finger problem. This study presents an empirical analysis of two distinct text-entry methods for a one-line QWERTY keyboard: a traditional touch-based interaction and an input technique that leverages the rotary-crown, a feature commonly found on a substantial number of smartwatch devices. Interaction via the rotating crown enables text entry even when touch input is impractical—such as when wearing gloves, in wet conditions, or in cases of reduced precision like the ’fat finger’ problem. By rotating the rotary-crown, the user can navigate to and select the desired character, which is then input by pressing the corresponding key to confirm the selection. The method was evaluated in comparison to the touch-interaction: the results demonstrated that participants achieved higher accuracy with the rotary-crown input, with a Total Error Rate of 9%; conversely, participants exhibited faster performance with the touch-interaction, achieving a typing speed of 9.3 words per minute.

Environmental sustainability is a crucial aspect of all human activities, and recently, the field of artificial intelligence has also been required to analyze its impact in terms of energy efficiency and its relationship with accuracy. We have conducted a literature review to evaluate the sustainability of neural models, with a specific focus on neural transpilers. These models employ neural machine translation to convert source code from one programming language to another. Neural transpilers have attracted significant attention in the scientific community, with multiple studies published between 2022 and 2023 focusing on their potential integration into programmers’ development environments Our analysis focused on the environmental impact of these models, particularly in terms of electricity consumption, carbon emissions, and training time. Out of the seventeen primary studies we reviewed, nine reported information about training time and details about training devices. Our findings suggest a need for more detailed reporting on emissions and a better understanding of the carbon footprint associated with training time. This analysis sheds light on the urgency of considering the environmental costs of AI technologies and the importance of developing sustainable practices within the field.

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic caused in the human–computer interaction (HCI) research field. Specifically, we aim to investigate how the HCI empirical research methodology changed due to the restrictions caused by COVID-19. For this reason, we analyzed all the papers published in the 2021 edition of The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), which is generally considered the premier international conference for the field of HCI. Through the analysis of CHI papers, we identified four main effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on HCI research: influence on participants; influence on apparatus; influence on experiment procedure; other influences. These effects are described in detail and broken down into additional subcategories. Moreover, papers on pandemic-related topics were also identified. In addition, we performed some comparisons with the previous and successive edition of the conference, and extended some analysis, e.g categorization, to CHI 2022 papers. The analysis found that 23% of CHI 2021 papers and 36% of CHI 2022 papers reported some influences of the pandemic, the most common being a change in the procedures researchers used to interact with participants in their studies, in most cases based on remote communication technologies.

We present a technique that aims to make text editing on smartphones more efficient. One of the main difficulties of editing on smartphones is the cursor positioning since the characters are usually smaller than the user finger, and for this reason a number of editing techniques have been proposed. Our technique is primarily designed to help the user position the cursor in the desired location: after the user has tapped on the text to position the cursor, soft keys with directional arrows appear on the screen and allow the user to move the cursor by tapping on them. Moreover, in addition to cursor placement, the technique also allows to perform the main editing operations through additional dedicated buttons for select/cut/copy/paste.

Abstract In this paper, we present ParVis, an interactive visual system for the animated visualization of logged parser trace executions. The system allows a parser implementer to create a visualizer for generated parsers by simply defining a JavaScript module that maps each logged parser instruction into a set of events driving the visual system interface. The result is a set of interacting graphical/text windows that allows users to explore logged parser executions and helps them to have a complete understanding of how the parser behaves during its execution on a given input. We used our system to visualize the behavior of textual as well as visual parsers and describe here two of these uses. Moreover, in order to validate the efficacy of our system, we ran a user experiment where students analyzed a CUP-generated parser both with ParVis, instantiated to LALR parsers, and the standard CUP debug facilities. The results show that students can indeed analyze parser behavior and find mistakes in parser specifications more easily and quickly using ParVis. In particular, in some parser design tasks, using ParVis participants achieved a higher success rate of 50% in 42% less time with respect to the baseline system.

Abstract In this article, we present PolyRec Gesture Design Tool (PolyRec GDT), a tool that allows the definition of gesture sets for mobile applications. It supports the entire process of designing gesture sets, from collecting gestures to analyzing and exporting the set created for use in a mobile application. It is equipped with the PolyRec gesture recognizer, a unistroke recognizer based on template matching with good accuracy and performances while still allowing support for other recognizers. The main features of PolyRec GDT include the ability to collect gestures directly on mobile devices, to detect similarities between gestures to help the designer to detect ambiguities in the design phase, and the ability to automatically select the most representative gestures for each gesture class by using a clustering technique to increase recognition speed without affecting accuracy. Experimental results show that this latter feature allows an increase in accuracy compared with when the same operation is performed manually by developers or randomly by software. Finally, a user study was carried out to evaluate PolyRec GDT, in which participants were asked to use it to add gesture functionality to a mobile application. The results showed that with the support of PolyRec GDT this operation took only a few minutes for participants with mobile development experience, whereas it would have taken much longer without the support of PolyRec GDT.

In this paper, we present Domus, an educational game for multi-touch tables that makes use of a Tangible User Interface (TUI). In particular, it uses as game pieces physical objects called tangibles, which have conductive feet arranged in different patterns so that the device can recognize their position/rotation.

In this paper, we present ParVis, an interactive visual system for the animated visualization of logged parser trace executions. The system allows a parser implementer to create a visualizer for generated parsers by simply defining a JavaScript module that maps each logged parser instruction into a set of events driving the visual system interface. The result is a set of interacting graphical/text windows that allows users to explore logged parser executions and helps them to have a complete understanding of how the parser behaves during its execution on a given input.

Generalized parsers for visual languages result to be more complex than the corresponding text parsers: their applications to ambiguous inputs with visual tokens scattered and/or connected on a 2d or 3d space are very difficult to trace without the support of proper visualization tools. In this work, we give a brief description of generalized parsers for visual structures and illustrate a tool for the visualization of its execution. To do this, we provide examples based on a Visual Generalized LR (VGLR) parser applied to flowcharts.

The results of an experimental study on handwriting on smartwatches are described in this study. This study aims to gain knowledge on the current practice and possible future developments on smartwatches. This includes two experiments: the first experiment aims to compare a state-of-the-art commercial handwriting system to other competing text entry methods based on soft keyboards, whereas the other experiment allows us to gather some useful information regarding users' performance and preference in an ideal setting (without character recognition), so as to direct the design of future handwriting applications on small devices. In the first experiment, we obtained an initial entry speed of 7.5 wpm, lower than that of the other compared methods. The performance obtained in the second experiment, in the range of 15-19 wpm, suggests that by appropriately changing some settings (e.g., improved recognition and feedback, preferred writing style, and spare of space characters), the entry speed can be significantly increased. The results also showed that users prefer to enter uppercase characters and that, although this style of writing requires a significantly greater number of gestures per character, it does not adversely affect the writing speed.

We present a software system aimed at providing support to the management of processes for the self evaluation of the quality of degree programmes. The system was developed for quality management at the University of Salerno, Italy. Its main functionalities include: monitoring of the process status, scheduling of meetings, document management, support for working groups. With the help of some screenshots, the main features will be described in the context of scenarios that commonly arise in the management of processes of self-assessment of quality.

KeyScretch is a text entry method for devices equipped with touch-screens, based on a menu-augmented soft keyboard. In these keyboards, a menu containing a small number of frequent characters is shown, while a key is pressed, allowing further character entry by menu selection. KeyScretch improves the previously studied menu-based methods by enabling the interpretation of compound strokes, which allow the input of text chunks longer than two characters. The performance of the method is analyzed on different kinds of touch-screens: First, we present a 25-session user study on a stylus-based device, showing that an instance of the method optimized for Italian can be learned in a reasonable time by the users and significantly outperforms the traditional method based on the tapping interaction. Then, we define and validate a model for predicting expert text entry rates on finger-based devices. The predicted rates for instances of KeyScretch optimized for different Western languages vary from about 44-50 words/min on the Qwerty layout, enabling improvements in the range of 30-49% as compared with the traditional method.

Auto completion has proven effective in various text-based applications. Conversely, no experiments have been carried out on the automatic completion of hand-drawn symbols and only a few systems have been presented in the literature for this purpose. Nevertheless, such a feature might be useful in different domains, e.g. for accelerating symbol retrieval and for launching complex gestural commands. In this paper we present a user study aimed at evaluating the human performance in hand-drawn symbol auto completion. In particular, using a set of more than 100 symbols belonging to the Military Course of Action domain, we evaluated the conditions under which the users are willing to exploit the auto completion functionality and those under which they can use it efficiently. As a result, we obtained that in a drawing task the auto completion functionality can be used in a profitable way, with a drawing time saving of about 18%.

Euler diagrams (EDs) are a popular means of visualizing set-based relationships. We describe the advancement of EulerSketch, based on a novel encoding of EDs. In particular, EulerSketch allows a user to sketch and interact with EDs and automatically produce a code representation for them. It also enables code storage and retrieval and permits to automatically re-draw an ED from its code representation. Some features are inspired by earlier works [4, 6, 3].

We present a code which captures the topology of closed-curve based diagrams (e.g. Euler diagrams (EDs) are used to visualize set-based relationships, whilst knot diagrams represent knotted structures), often used in visual languages. We briefly indicate how to construct a diagram from such a code. Furthermore, we present an interactive software artefact with a human-centric focus, permitting users the freedom to construct and transform diagrams at either the diagram or the code level, implementing algorithmic procedures developed.

We present a video game to learn the KeyScretch text entry method. The typing game helps the users to learn the method while having fun, letting them practice on the most frequent gestures associated to text and reach an acceptable expertise level.

In this paper, preliminary studies for a new eager recognition algorithm for online hand drawn symbols and the usefulness of symbol auto-completion through experiments with users working on a real application are briefly described. The recognition of individual symbols is often not enough, as a matter of fact most of the times graphical symbols are parts of diagrams and the approach is sensitive to the preprocessing performed to extract the primitives.

The progress achieved in the field of computer vision and the great improvement and diffusion of mobile technologies enable the exploration of new models of human-computer interaction, especially with respect to Augmented Reality (AR) scenarios. On the other hand, the lack of rapid prototyping environments for the development and testing of new systems of AR and Mixed Reality, may slow down the process of adoption of these technologies. This document, based on the state of the art of AR technology and on particular of AR development tools, describes the work in progress for the definition of a tool for the rapid prototyping of applications using mobile devices. The scope of the tool is twofold: to simplify the business development and simulation process of specific scenarios and to provide a tool to support the analysis of the quality of human interactions in AR environments.

In the field of syntactic recognition of hand-drawn visual languages, the recognition of the relations among graphical symbols is one of the first important tasks to be accomplished and is usually reduced to recognize the attachment areas of each symbol and the relations among them. In this paper we present an approach for identifying attachment areas on sketched symbols. The approach is independent from the method used to recognize symbols and assumes that the symbol has already been recognized. The approach is evaluated through a user study aimed at comparing the attachment areas detected by the system to those devised by the users. The results show that the system can identify attachment areas with a reasonable accuracy.

In this paper we present a novel approach to accessing the Web, that enables automatically acquiring data from Web sites and making them accessible to the user through a database query paradigm. The basic idea is to build, once the user has specified a generic domain of interest, the domain conceptual representation, to instantiate it with data extracted from Web sites (so to build a materialized view over the Web), and to query such a conceptual representation through an easy-to-use visual interface. Knowledge representation techniques are used for both the internal modeling of the conceptual representation and for supporting the automatic extraction of data from Web sites to feed the materialized view. We describe a prototype implementation, focusing on the internal representation of information and on the process for analysing Web sites and acquiring data from them. Our preliminary results support our intuition that, at least for certain kinds of queries, the proposed approach can effectively provide the desired information.