Smart-Pomodoro is an application aimed at improving efficiency, focus and time management in study sessions for children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). By using Smart-Pomodoro, caregivers can design customized study sessions, thus assisting children to mitigate their ADHD symptoms and influence their motivation. Therefore, the caregiver can set goal-oriented objectives and gamification strategies to make studying more engaging, enhancing self-efficacy, focus, and behaviour. The system also leverages the smartwatch’s features to facilitate clear caregiver–child communication. Accordingly, Smart-Pomodoro employs a real-time, smartwatch-based and rule-driven approach to prompt children to plan and manage their study sessions and breaks. This unique feature delivers real-time feedback and gamification for children with ADHD, while increasing the caregiver’s awareness of their condition and behaviour throughout the session. In the performed evaluation, parents of children with ADHD (from both primary and secondary) rated the system positively, praising its ease of use, usefulness, and effectiveness.

Abstract Bullying is a complex social issue that requires adaptive and context-aware intervention strategies. This paper presents a multi-agent model that integrates Theory of Mind (ToM), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Continual Learning (CL) to improve the detection and intervention of bullying behaviors. ToM allows agents to infer the beliefs, intentions, and emotions of others, enabling socially aware decision-making. RL equips the observer agent with the ability to learn from past experiences, refining its intervention strategies dynamically. CL ensures long-term adaptability by allowing the system to retain learned behaviors while continuously adjusting to new bullying patterns. The proposed approach incorporates abstraction mechanisms derived from Theory-Theory (TT) and Simulation Theory (ST), enabling agents to reason about bullying interactions either through predefined rules or simulated experiences. The system has been evaluated in a simulated school environment with varying levels of bullying severity, demonstrating its effectiveness in dynamically adapting intervention strategies. The results indicate that combining ToM, RL, and CL leads to superior performance compared to standard RL-based approaches, particularly in high-risk bullying scenarios. This work provides a foundation for the development of socially intelligent AI systems capable of proactive and context-sensitive intervention in educational settings.

The Digital Twin (DT) concept has evolved into its current definition since its creation in 2003. It now comprises a physical entity and its virtual counterpart, plus their interrelated data connections and uses the virtual counterpart to monitor, simulate, control, and predict the physical entitys behaviour. Most of the proposals in this field have focused on specific use cases rather than on describing the proper guidelines for designing DTs. This paper addresses a significant research challenge by means of a domain-agnostic proposal for DT design. Our new proposal, MAS4DT, is a method for guiding stakeholders in their DT designs following the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) paradigm, so that the MAS provides the support for the development of the virtual counterpart of the DT. In this work, the application of MAS4DT is illustrated by a DT wind turbine design. We also describe MAS4DTs evaluation in a controlled experiment of its understandability with regard to the 5 dimensions model, another well-known proposal for this type of design. The evaluation was designed considering the properties that a DT should support. The results show that MAS4DT outperforms the 5 dimensions model and indicates its potential use for DT design. Finally, this controlled experiment represents the first empirical validation of proposals for developing D

: Digital Twins (DTs) are used to augment physical entities by exploiting assorted computational approaches applied to the virtual twin counterpart. A DT is generally described as a physical entity, its virtual counterpart, and the data connections between them. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) paradigm is alike DTs in many ways. Agents of MAS are entities operating and interacting in a specific environment, while exploring and collecting data to solve some tasks. : This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review (SLR) focused on the analysis of current proposals exploiting the synergies of DTs and MAS. This research aims to synthesize studies that focus on the use of MAS to support DTs development and MAS that exploit DTs, paving the way for future research. : A SLR methodology was used to conduct a detailed study analysis of 64 primary studies out of a total of 220 studies that were initially identified. This SLR analyses three research questions related to the synergies between MAS and DT. : The most relevant findings of this SLR and their implications for further research are the following: i) most of the analyzed proposals design digital shadows rather than DT; ii) they do not fully support the properties expected from a DT; iii) most of the MAS properties have not fully exploited for the development of DT; iv) ontologies are frequently used for specifying semantic models of the physical twin. : Based on the results of this SLR, our conclusions for the community are presented in a research agenda that highlights the need of innovative theoretical proposals and design frameworks that guide the development of DT. They should be defined exploiting the properties of MAS to unleash the full potential of DT. Finally, ontologies for machine learning models should be designed for its use in DT.

Welcome to EICS, the Engineering Interactive Computing Systems community, PACMHCI/EICS journal, and annual conference! In this short article, we introduce newcomers to the field and to our community with an overview of what EICS is and how it positions with respect to other venues in Human-Computer Interaction, such as CHI, UIST, and IUI, highlighting its legacy and paying homage to past scientific events from which EICS emerged. We also take this opportunity to enumerate and exemplify scientific contributions to the field of Engineering Interactive Computing Systems, which we hope to guide researchers and practitioners towards making their future PACMHCI/EICS submissions successful and impactful in the EICS community.

Abstract As in any other system, an accurate requirements specification is essential to developing a collaborative system, which has special kinds of requirements that are hard to specify by means of current Requirements Engineering techniques. The Collaborative Systems Requirement Modeling Framework (CSRMF) was developed to address this problem; the original Collaborative Systems Requirement Modeling Language was extended and modeled to properly deal with collaboration and awareness requirements. The developed CSRMF framework consists of 3 components: an Requirements Engineering modeling language able to represent collaboration among users as well as awareness needs, a set of design guidelines that drive Computer Supported Cooperative Work system specification by means of 5 different types of diagrams, and a supporting computer‐aided software engineering tool to specify and validate Computer Supported Cooperative Work system requirements. CSRMF provides Requirements Engineers with a complete solution to the specification of awareness‐demanding collaborative systems, as they can now take advantage of a language and a set of guidelines supported by a tool to guide them in specifying system requirements.

Similarly to what happens when designing a single-user system, designers and developers will probably have to address some design problems that have often appeared previously in some other developments. This kind of recurrent problem can be identified, documented and captured in a design pattern that provides a reusable solution to a common problem. The main aim of this work is to provide a design pattern that can be applied to the design of CSCW applications supporting Workspace Awareness (WA). The object-oriented pattern presented answers all WA questions by means of a class structure representing the typical entities and behaviors available in collaborative applications (e.g. users, artifacts, collaborative actions). Moreover, a proof of concept is presented, thus assessing the feasibility of this pattern for a concrete technology, namely C# and Visual Studio 2012.

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) environments enable users to interact with each other by using computers to conveniently share relevant data across the user interface. Awareness is an essential requirement in CSCW to convey precise information about the context in which the work in group is taking place, contributing thus to collaboration between users. In this kind of environments, we need to go beyond traditional human–computer interaction to embrace human–computer–human interaction (HCHI). It is necessary to devise flexible mechanisms to support HCHI in dealing with the diversity of contexts and group concerns. Furthermore, these mechanisms should endeavor to provide a seamless integration with current development techniques. This work presents a multi-purpose framework to include group awareness in HCHI systems in a seamless way. Proposed framework is based on the Dichotomic View of Plasticity approach. An experiment was conducted with two different versions of a specific groupware platform: the original platform and a new version of it, extended by means of the proposed framework. The goal was twofold: (i) to verify the benefits of applying this framework and (ii) to validate, in terms of user satisfaction, the improvement regarding groupware features introduced in the extended version. The results of the experiment backed up our hypothesis by showing that proposed framework is able to add awareness support to existing human–computer–Human (HCH) interfaces in a seamless way. It is also showed that added awareness components effectively contributed to achieve a higher level of collaboration among users.

A collaborative system is a distributed software which allows several users to work together and carry out collaboration, communication and coordination tasks. To perform these tasks, the users have to be aware of other user's actions, usually by means of a set of awareness techniques. When we are defining a collaborative system, the awareness techniques can be considered as non-functional requirements bounded to some quality factors, such as usability. However, serious flaws can be found during the specification of these systems if we use the usual Requirement Engineering techniques available, because their expressiveness limitations when dealing with non-functional requirements. In this paper an empirical evaluation is introduced to determine if these techniques are really appropriate to model groupware requirements and which is the best approach to specify this kind of systems. With this aim, a collaborative text editor is used to evaluate whether the current techniques for Requirement Engineering are appropriated or not, exploiting the relation between awareness capabilities and standard quality factors.

The specification of model adaptation and generation rules is a topic of great interest for the user interface development community, since there are more and more approaches supporting the model-based approach. The ubiquitousness in interaction and the different user profiles are not the only challenges when designing interactive systems. Furthermore, the context of use evolves over time. In this situation, there is a strong need to provide a set of adaptation rules to make the user interface evolve according to the context of use evolution. This paper contributes a metamodel for the definition of adaptation rules in a systematic approach, pursuing engineer adaptation. Moreover, a tool called T:XML is presented that supports the specification of adaptation rules using a visual notation that greatly simplifies the process of designing adaptation for model-based user interface environments.

The rehabilitation of a patient with acquired brain injury begins during the acute treatment phase. It is important to focus on maximizing the patient's capabilities at home and in the community. Positive reinforcement helps recovery by improving self-esteem and promoting independence. In this context, user interface design is very important for several reasons. First of all the more intuitive the user interface the easier it is to use. The better the user interface is the easier it is to train people to use it, reducing training costs. The better your user interface is the more your users will like to use it, increasing their satisfaction with their work. In this paper a Web-based system, namely HABITAT, for the treatment of acquired brain injured is presented, which has been design by means of model-based user interface design techniques to maximize the effectiveness of the treatment activities.

The development of 3D user interfaces is mostly focused on technology and the ways of using it, and so the main concerns are the selection of hardware, software and interaction techniques. The process of development itself is as important as these issues, but it is usually ignored or poorly documented. This paper introduces the TRES-D methodology, and illustrates its application in the development of three different glove-based interfaces, not only to show the benefits of using these devices, but also the benefits of using such a methodological framework.

In this paper, we introduce a project that validates the educational capabilities of a game. This game, called Prismaker, incorporates two versions: a physical version and a virtual version. Thus, we want to find out the real potentialities of games in learning processes and to evaluate a single game from two points of view: the physical version and the virtual version that is being developed.