Social Stories are widely used to help children with Autism Spectrum Disorder understand social situations. Clinical practice emphasizes the importance of co-constructing Social Stories with children, mediated by a therapist. In this paper, we present FantasIA, a system that leverages the latest Generative Artificial Intelligence models to support the co-construction of Social Stories within Interactive Smart Spaces, while preserving therapist control over the creation process. These Social Stories provide immersive experiences in which embodied interaction and multisensory stimulation enhance children’s engagement in narrative activities.

In this paper, we discuss the potential of shared Cross-Reality (CR) for individuals with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDDs) and describe the development and preliminary evaluation of a system that implements this approach, called Social Match UP (SMUP). SMUP integrates Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) within a single cooperative game, allowing seamless transitions between the two forms of virtuality. Additionally, it incorporates a conversational assistant powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) to provide real-time guidance, encourage communication, and promote user engagement. An exploratory study was conducted with four participants diagnosed with NDDs, focusing on the usability of CR transitions and users’ perceptions of the conversational assistant. Given the small sample size, results are intended to inform design implications rather than establish statistical significance. While the ability to switch between VR and AR was acknowledged as a valuable feature, participants found the transition difficult to use, occasionally disrupting their immersion. VR was generally preferred over AR, though it remains unclear whether this preference was due to usability challenges related to reality switching. The results also indicate that the LLM-powered assistant was perceived as friendly and engaging, fostering a sense of presence, particularly in VR settings, where it felt more realistic and immersive.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is characterized by persistent and significant language impairments. Children with DLD may experience difficulties in grammar, phonology, vocabulary, and specific morphosyntactic structures, such as clitic pronouns and passive constructions. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative treatment approach termed the Acting Argument Paradigm (AAP). Grounded in psycholinguistic theories, the core idea of this approach is to translate the abstract linguistic concept of argument movement into physical actions that actively engage children during language therapy. To operationalize the AAP, we developed a Tangible User Interface, namely Moovy, that enables children to manipulate physical objects and fosters a multisensory learning experience. This article presents the AAP and Moovy and discusses the results of a 6-week experimental study involving children (N = 30) with DLD. Preliminary findings indicate Moovy’s potential as an effective tool for speech therapy programs, offering promise for improving the linguistic skills of children with DLD.

The paper investigates the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Conversational Agents (CAs) to encourage a shift in consumption patterns from a demand-driven to a supply-based paradigm.Specifically, the research examines the role of anthropomorphic design in delivering environmentally conscious messages by comparing two CA designs: a personified agent representing an appliance and a traditional, non-personified assistant.A lab study (N=26) assessed the impact of these designs on interaction, perceived self-efficacy, and engagement.Results indicate that LLMbased CAs significantly enhance users' self-reported eco-friendly behaviors, with participants expressing greater confidence in managing energy consumption.While the anthropomorphic design did not notably affect self-efficacy, those interacting with the personified agent reported a stronger sense of connection with the system.These findings suggest that although anthropomorphic CAs may improve user engagement, both designs hold promise for fostering sustainable behaviors in home energy management.

Autonomy is a central concern for many caregivers of autistic individuals, particularly in domains such as mobility, where environmental complexity and variability pose significant challenges. In this work, we explore a cross-reality approach to support the development of autonomous public transportation skills—specifically intercity train travel—through a combination of Virtual Reality (VR), in-situ Augmented Reality (AR), and a conversational agent. Our system provides at-home VR training to simulate travel scenarios, AR-based support during real-world travel, and interactive guidance through a conversational interface, creating a cohesive and adaptive learning experience. We conducted a field study with ten participants over three months, which showed autonomy improvements comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Our findings contribute updated insights and design considerations for the application of cross-reality systems in accessibility and mobility training for neurodiverse users.

The article investigates cooperative interaction in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) and compares the potential of these interaction paradigms to enhance the communication skills of this population. Two versions of a cooperative game called SMUP (Social Match UP) were created in AR and VR, respectively, involving NDD specialists in the co-design process. During a within-subjects empirical study involving 30 subjects with NDD, we measured both the usability and verbal interaction of the two versions, known as SMUP-AR and SMUP-VR. The findings suggest that both SMUP-AR and SMUP-VR exhibited a good degree of usability for individuals with NDD, with no statistically significant differences between the two versions. However, the evaluation of communication skills, based on the analysis of the verbal production of users under the two experimental conditions, indicates that SMUP-AR had a stronger effect in promoting dialogic interaction compared to SMUP-VR. In addition, the paper discusses insights from the study on the UX design of cooperative AR and VR technology for people with NDD.

One of the most promising technologies inside the Extended Reality (XR) spectrum is Augmented Reality. This technology is already in people’s pockets regarding Mobile Augmented Reality with their smartphones. The scientific community still needs answers about how humans could and should interact in environments where perceived stimuli are different from fully physical or digital circumstances. Moreover, it is still being determined if people accept these new technologies in different social environments and interaction settings or if some obstacles could exist. This paper explores the impact of the Social Environment and the Focus of social interaction on users while playing a location-based augmented reality game, measuring it with user experience and social acceptance indicators. An empirical study in a within-subject fashion was performed in different social environments and under different settings of social interaction focus with N = 28 participants compiling self-reported questionnaires after playing a Scavenger Hunt in Augmented Reality. The measures from two different Social Environments (Crowded vs. Uncrowded) resulted in statistically relevant mean differences with indicators from the Social Acceptability dimension. Moreover, the analyses show statistically relevant differences between the variances from different degrees of Social Interaction Focus with Overall Social Presence, Perceived Psychological Engagement, Perceived Attentional Engagement, and Perceived Emotional Contagion. The results suggest that a location-based AR game played in different social environments and settings can influence the user experience’s social dimension. Therefore, they should be carefully considered while designing immersive technological experiences in public spaces involving social interactions between players.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) affects children’s comprehension and production of spoken language without any known biomedical condition. The importance of early identification of DLD is widely acknowledged. Several studies have explored DLD predictors to identify children needing further diagnostic investigation. Most of these measures might be problematic for young children and bilingual children. Based on literature reporting fragile rhythmic abilities in children with DLD, in our study, we followed a different approach. We explored how non-linguistic measures of rhythmic anticipation can be gathered by means of advanced information technology and used to identify children at risk of DLD. With this aim, we developed MARS, a web-based tool to collect such data in a playful way and to analyze them using Machine Learning. MARS engages children in rhythmic babbling exercises, records their vocal productions, and analyzes the recordings. We discuss the methodological rationale of MARS and its underlying technology, and we describe a preliminary study with N = 47 children with and without DLD. The analysis of the audio features of participants’ rhythmic vocal productions highlights different patterns in the two groups. This result, although preliminary, suggests that MARS could be a valuable tool for early DLD assessment.

Recent developments in accessible electronic-making toolkits have opened up avenues for individuals with intellectual disabilities(ID) to actively participate in creating their own smart objects based on the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. These toolkits present a novel opportunity to foster the inclusion of this often-under-considered community in the development of personalized solutions that can impact their autonomy and well-being. However, understanding IoT encompasses comprehending the inter-object connection paradigm at the core of this technology, an aspect that is not adequately covered by the existing accessible toolkits. To fill this gap, this paper illustrates the design and evaluation of MakeNodes, a tangible toolkit to involve people with ID in making smart-thing networks in a guided, collaborative, and engaging way. The toolkit comprises a series of input and output nodes that can be paired to make any object or surface smart. The paper illustrates how MakeNodes empowers people with ID through IoT-making activities that promote collaborative work to address personal needs. Key findings are discussed in the form of lessons learned concerning the importance of physical and visual elements, hands-on exploration, and interaction robustness in improving the accessibility of IoT-making toolkits for people with ID.

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition that can affect autonomy and independence. Our research explores the integration of Cross-Reality and Conversational Agents for Autistic persons to improve ability and confidence in everyday life situations. We combine two technologies of the Virtual-Real continuum. User experiences unfold from the simulation of tasks in VR to the execution of similar tasks supported by AR in the real world. A speech-based Conversational Agent is integrated with both VR and AR. It provides contextualized help, promotes generalization, and stimulates users to apply what they learned in the virtual space. The paper presents the approach and describes an empirical study involving 17 young Autistic persons.

Abstract Difficulty in emotion expression and recognition is typical of the personality trait known as alexithymia, which is often observed in persons with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD). Past research has investigated various forms of conversational technology for people with NDD, but only a few studies have explored the use of conversational agents to reduce alexithymia. This paper presents Emoty, a speech-based conversational agent designed for people with NDD to train emotional communication skills. An original characteristic of this agent is that it exploits the emotional expression power of the voice. Emoty engages users in small conversations during which they are asked to repeat sentences and express specific emotions using the appropriate vocal tone. We ran an empirical study to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of our conversational agent. The study involved 19 Italian individuals with NDD and alexithymia aged from 29 to 45 (10 women and 9 men). They used Emoty in five individual sessions over two and a half months. The results showed that two subjects encountered problems using the system because they had difficulty verbalizing the sentences and were not understood by Emoty. The others performed the assigned tasks with the agent. Their capability to express emotions with the voice consistently improved, and other benefits were observed in other social and communication skills.

Conversational Interfaces for user assistance are becoming persuasive. Today, though, most chatbots are not integrated into the application in which they are placed, but only superimposed, with no communication between the conversational and the graphical interface. We propose Multi-modal Conversational Troubleshooting Kit (MCTK), a Python package to easily integrate a conversational agent for troubleshooting in web applications. MCTK is multi-modal: once the system recognizes the problem the user is encountering, the textual solution in the chat is coupled with visual hints in the GUI. On top of that, MCTK is easy to configure and offers separation of concerns: dialogue designers can work on the conversation without the necessity of modifying the code, and vice versa.

Communication can be defined as the understanding and exchanging of meaningful messages. The role of communication is central to the lives of human beings as, everyday, we use language to interact with the world around us. Linguistic skills play a fundamental role in this scenario and Language Disorders (LD) are impairments that limit the processing of linguistic information. Early and accurate identification of LD is thus essential to promote lifelong learning and well-being. From an evolutionary perspective, some human language constructs evolved from an ancestral motor system and share the same neural pathways in the Broca’s area of the brain. This suggests a correlation between action and language. If such a relationship is well established and reliable, it would be possible to use the former as a marker of the latter. The hypothesis of our work, in a nutshell, is that movement can be a predictor of language. To study this correlation, we developed C(H)o(L)ordination, a Mixed Reality (MR) application for HoloLens 2. The application offers several activities based on visual stimuli involving motor movements, which tap on the same skills needed to perform some language tasks. We performed an exploratory study with N=22 users to test the application usability and user experience. The results suggest that C(H)o(L)ordination is a usable and powerful tool to gather insights on the ongoing debate about language evolution and language disorders.

MagicMuseum is a set of team-based, immersive, full-body activities for Cultural Heritage Education of primary school children. MagicMuseum exploits the interactive and multisensory capability of the Magic Room, an indoor smart space equipped with IoT-enriched components such as floor and wall projections, smart lighting, music and sound, motion and gesture sensors, and smart objects. The paper describes MagicMuseum and briefly reports an exploratory study involving 22 children at a local primary school.

Measuring cognitive functions is a complex and challenging process, and researchers usually conduct their study in experimental settings and with standardized tests. Such an approach is raising more and more criticism. Especially about the capability of psychology’s laboratory experiments to provide generalizable and accurate indicators of impairments outside the laboratory boundaries in everyday life. This is acknowledged as the ”real-world or lab” dilemma. Most tests traditionally performed using paper-and-pencil may fail to detect the individual’s difficulties in the real world. The scientific community has launched a quest for new digitized, interactive, and more ”ecological” versions. Our work investigates a novel approach to this topic that exploits interactive Multi-Sensory Environments (iMSE) and questions how iMSEs could contribute to the neuropsychology assessment field. The paper describes NEP-Neuro-Psychological Suite, a set of game-based activities in iMSE inspired by widely adopted neuropsychological tests. The suite provides a context in which existing or new neuropsychological tests can be experimented, extended, and modified with stimuli, contents, and tasks closer to real-world situations. We report an exploratory empirical study (N=22) on a well-known test to assess attention skills, the Stroop Test. The results, although very preliminary, provide insights into the effects of transposing classic tests into a novel form and the role that iMSEs can play in the debate about the ”real-world or lab” dilemma.

Cognitive rigidity and behavioral and communication problems are the most common symptoms that characterize Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In fact, people with ASD face complications in everyday life, from interacting with other persons to being autonomous in the most ordinary daily tasks. To overcome these limitations and improve their quality of life, we developed 5A. 5A exploits cutting-edge technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Conversational Agents (CA), combining smartphones and wearable headsets to offer new forms of intervention to persons with ASD. Virtual reality experiences enable learning common tasks, such as using public transport, through simulation in a safe environment. When people are in similar real-life situations, AR can help them generalize the skills they have learned in VR by overlaying interactive media assets on top of the view of the physical world around them. A customizable conversational assistant provides individualized prompts and feedback in both VR and AR to provide maximum user support.

Cognitive impairment is a condition that results in a person’s inability to remember, learn, concentrate or make decisions that affect his/her everyday life. The assessment of these deficits is usually performed using standardized paper and pencil or computerized tests within a controlled clinical setting. Many traditionally designed tools show only low to moderate levels of ecological validity, limiting the reliability of the collected measures. The proposed system adapts existing screening tests within an immersive virtual reality environment with 360° video, recreating a familiar setting for the patient. This faithful reproduction of everyday environments and situations can enhance the ecological validity of the assessment procedure while maintaining a standardized stimuli delivery, all in a controlled and safe setting. As a computerized system, virtual reality technology allows an error-free computation of the test scores, here collected by means of accuracy for each task. The system involves many technologies aimed at capturing any kind of user input provided by the patient. Additionally, using a visor with integrated eye-tracker sensor, the system can register the visual exploration pattern adopted by the patient during the task execution, providing information concerning the attentional and visuo-spatial functioning which are not obtainable using traditional assessment procedures. Finally, the results of an exploratory study that was conducted with 11 users on the reliability and usability of the system are presented.

Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) are charac-terised by impairments in communication. Socially assistive robots have been identified as a promising avenue to alleviate their burden. Since NDDs have different needs, their way of communicating with a robot (e.g., speech-based) could differ among individuals. This paper aims to investigate the most suitable modality to communicate with a robot for NDDs - among voice, cards, and buttons - and explore their opinion on this matter. We ran an exploratory study involving 29 NDDs participants: 13 of them could freely communicate with an autonomous QT robot, 9 took part in a group discussion, and 7 first interacted individually with the robot, and then they participated in a group discussion. Our results showed that i) the cards were the most used communication modality, ii) voice can be used for counting games, buttons for multiple-choice games, and cards for memory-like games, iii) opinions did not differ much among groups.*

Despite the growing interest in smart homes and robotics in many domains, very few studies have explored how socially assistive robots (SAR) can be integrated into smart homes to control them while socially interacting with people. This paper explores two factors - embodiment and movement - that influence the human-robot interaction into a domestic context. We conducted a within-subjects study with three con-ditions (disembodied-static, embodied-static, embodied-dynamic) involving the conventional population. Participants (N = 10) interacted into two speech-based tasks with an autonomous Temi robot fully integrated with a smart home (e.g., lights, room temperature, music, oven control) and answered questions about their perception towards the robot, including perceived sociability and social presence. The results indicated that participants perceived the embodied-movable robot as significantly more sociable and socially present than static or disembodied ones.

With the availability of reliable and low-cost DNA sequencing, human genomics is relevant to a growing number of end-users, including biologists and clinicians. Typical interactions require applying comparative data analysis to huge repositories of genomic information for building new knowledge, taking advantage of the latest findings in applied genomics for healthcare. Powerful technology for data extraction and analysis is available, but broad use of the technology is hampered by the complexity of accessing such methods and tools. This work presents GeCoAgent, a big-data service for clinicians and biologists. GeCoAgent uses a dialogic interface, animated by a chatbot, for supporting the end-users’ interaction with computational tools accompanied by multi-modal support. While the dialogue progresses, the user is accompanied in extracting the relevant data from repositories and then performing data analysis, which often requires the use of statistical methods or machine learning. Results are returned using simple representations (spreadsheets and graphics), while at the end of a session the dialogue is summarized in textual format. The innovation presented in this article is concerned with not only the delivery of a new tool but also our novel approach to conversational technologies, potentially extensible to other healthcare domains or to general data science.

Nowadays, Virtual Reality (VR) technology can be potentially used everywhere through wearable head-mounted displays. Nevertheless, it is still uncommon to see VR devices used in public settings. In these contexts, unaware bystanders in the surroundings might influence the User Experience (UX) and create concerns about the social acceptability of this technology. The user acts in a Social Environment (SE), characterized by surrounding people's number, proximity, and behavior. Simultaneously, VR applications often require a different degree of interactivity concerning body movements and controllers interaction. In this paper, the influence of Social Environments, and degree of interactivity on User Experience and social acceptability is investigated. Four Social Environments were simulated employing 360° Videos, and two VR games developed with two levels of interactivity. Results showed a statistically significant influence of Social Environments on Overall UX as well as Public VR, Interaction, Isolation, Privacy and Safety acceptability, and of the degree of interactivity on Presence, Valence, Arousal, Overall UX, UX Hedonic quality, and Safety acceptability. Findings indicate that Social Environments and degree of interactivity should be taken into account while designing VR applications.

BACKGROUND: With the advancements of Next Generation Techniques, a tremendous amount of genomic information has been made available to be analyzed by means of computational methods. Bioinformatics Tertiary Analysis is a complex multidisciplinary process that represents the final step of the whole bioinformatics analysis pipeline. Despite the popularity of the subject, the Bioinformatics Tertiary Analysis process has not yet been specified in a systematic way. The lack of a reference model results into a plethora of technological tools that are designed mostly on the data and not on the human process involved in Tertiary Analysis, making such systems difficult to use and to integrate. METHODS: To address this problem, we propose a conceptual model that captures the salient characteristics of the research methods and human tasks involved in Bioinformatics Tertiary Analysis. The model is grounded on a user study that involved bioinformatics specialists for the elicitation of a hierarchical task tree representing the Tertiary Analysis process. The outcome was refined and validated using the results of a vast survey of the literature reporting examples of Bioinformatics Tertiary Analysis activities. RESULTS: The final hierarchical task tree was then converted into an ontological representation using an ontology standard formalism. The results of our research provides a reference process model for Tertiary Analysis that can be used both to analyze and to compare existing tools, or to design new tools. CONCLUSIONS: To highlight the potential of our approach and to exemplify its concrete applications, we describe a new bioinformatics tool and how the proposed process model informed its design.

Abstract Phygital interaction is a form of tangible interaction where digital and physical contents are combined in such a way that the locus of multimedia information is detached from the physical material(s) manipulated by the user. The use of phygital interaction is supported by several theoretical approaches that emphasize the development of cognitive skills dependent upon embodied interactions with the physical environment. Several studies demonstrate the potential of using phygital technologies for supporting people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the development of cognitive, sensorimotor, social and behavioral skills. Our research aims at exploring the potential of phygital interaction for (young) adults with ID in a real setting, using a research platform called Reflex as a case study. For this purpose, we ran an empirical study involving 17 participants with ID and 8 specialists, and compared Reflex with approaches making use of only digital contents or paper-based materials. Our findings highlighted the potentials of phygital approaches to perform interventions with people with ID, enhancing their performances with an appreciated interaction method. In addition, the post-study interviews with specialists favoured the adoption of phygital technologies in a social care context.

The dramatic increment of communication impairments among children increases the demand for intensive, highly accessible and low-cost interventions as well as new assessment and therapeutic tools. Our research aims at exploring the use of Conversational Agents (CAs) to support linguistic assessment and training among children with language impairment. One of the open research issues in this arena concerns the identification of the most appropriate form of "embodiment" of the CA for children to interact with. To this end, we evaluated the linguistic performance of 14 neuro-typical children and 3 children with language impairment comparing different CAs - physical object and virtual character - with "traditional" human interaction. Based on our analysis, we identify insights for the design of CA: the physicality does influence the performance of linguistic tasks for children with linguistic impairment. In addition, children seem to show a preference for the physical CA and perceived it as smarter than the virtual one.

Mixed Reality (MR) has been receiving increasing interest in the rehabilitation of people with Cognitive Disabilities. The power of MR in the context of therapies is the possibility to maintain a physical and psychological relationship with the surrounding environment while experiencing customized multimedia content and tasks that are appropriate for the needs of these users. The purpose of this work is to explore the potential of MR applications integrated with interactive speech-based Virtual Assistants. We present HoloLearn, an application for Microsoft HoloLens, which aims to help people with Cognitive Disabilities to improve their autonomy and learn simple activities of their everyday life (e.g., setting the table). The paper discusses the design features of the Virtual Assistant created and the results of a controlled study. The participants involved were 15 subjects with Cognitive Disabilities who used HoloLearn in two experimental conditions - with and without a Virtual Assistant. The results, although preliminary, indicate that enriching a MR experience with the presence of a speech-based Virtual Assistant would improve the user performance in the execution of the MR activities.

Interactive Multi-Sensory Environments (iMSEs) are room-sized interactive installations equipped with digitally enriched physical materials and ambient embedded devices. These items can sense users' presence, gestures, movements, and manipulation, and react by providing gentle stimulation (e.g., light, sound, projections, blowing bubbles, tactile feel, aromas) to different senses. Most of prior research on iMSEs investigates their use for persons with disabilities (e.g., autism). Our work focuses on the use of iMSEs in primary education contexts and for mixed groups of young students, i.e., children with and without disability. The paper describes the latest version of an iMSE called Magic Room that has been installed in two local schools. We report two empirical studies devoted to understand how the Magic Room could be used in inclusive educational settings, and to explore its potential benefits.

This paper presents the design and evaluation of IMAGINE, a novel interactive immersive smart space for embodied learning. In IMAGINE children use full-body movements and gestures to interact with multimedia educational contents projected on the wall and on the floor, while synchronized light effects enhance immersivity. A controlled study performed at a primary school with 48 children aged 6-8 highlights the educational potential of an immersive embodied solution, also compared to traditional teaching methods, and draws some implications for smart-space technology adoption in educational contexts.

Despite its inherent challenges, participatory design (PD) has unique benefits when designing technology for children, especially children with special needs. Researchers have developed a multitude of PD approaches to accommodate specific populations. However, a lack of understanding of the appropriateness of existing approaches across contexts presents a challenge for PD researchers. This workshop will provide an opportunity for PD researchers to exchange and reflect on their experiences of designing with children with special needs. We aim to identify, synthesize and collate PD best practices across contexts and participant groups.

The use of social robots in interventions for persons with Neuro-Developmental Disorder (NDD) has been explored in several studies. This paper describes a plush social robot with an elephant appearance called ELE that acts as conversational companion and has been designed to promote NDD persons engagement persons during interventions. We also present the initial evaluation of ELE and the preliminary results in terms of visual attention improvement in a storytelling context.

Resources for children are abundant, but finding suitable and appropriate resources for children in our information-rich society can be challenging. Due to this abundance of information, systems to find and recommend appropriate information for children are needed. Recommender systems (RS) for children have only recently begun to be researched. This area of research brings together researchers in education, child-development, computer scientists, designers, and more who address several issues including those related to education, algorithms, ethics, privacy, security. In this workshop we will: discuss and identify issues related to RS designed for children including challenges and limitations, discuss possible solutions to the identified challenges and plan for future research, and of critical importance work to build a community that explicitly looks at these critical issues. This workshop has a specific theme of educationally-related recommendations, but welcomes other child-oriented recommender system contributions.

Our research explores the potential of wearable Mixed Reality (MR) for people with Neuro-Developmental Disorders (NDD). The paper presents HoloLearn, a MR application designed in cooperation with NDD experts and implemented using HoloLens technology. The goal of HoloLearn is to help people with NDD learn how to perform simple everyday tasks in domestic environments and improve autonomy. An original feature of the system is the presence of a virtual assistant devoted to capture the user's attention and to give her/him hints during task execution in the MR environment. We performed an exploratory study involving 20 subjects with NDD to investigate the acceptability and usability of HoloLearn and its potential as a therapeutic tool. HoloLearn was well-accepted by the participants and the activities in the MR space were perceived as enjoyable, despite some usability problems associated to HoloLens interaction mechanism. More extensive and long term empirical research is needed to validate these early results, but our study suggests that HoloLearn could be adopted as a complement to more traditional interventions. Our work, and the lessons we learned, may help designers and developers of future MR applications devoted to people with NDD and to other people with similar needs.

The paper describes the design of Ahù, a nomadic smart multisensory solution for children's playful learning. Ahù has a combination of features that make it unique to the current available multisensory technologies for learning: it has a totem shape, supports multimedia stimuli by communicating through voice, lights and multimedia contents projected on two different fields on the floor and allows cooperative and competitive games. The system is nomadic, so it can be moved around, and can be controlled with easy input methods. An exploratory study investigates and provides Ahù's potential to promote engagement, collaboration, socialization and learning in classrooms.

Our research explores the potential of Wearable Immersive Virtual Reality (WIVR) as learning tool for children with disability, particularly Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDDs). NDD is characterized by severe and often co-existing deficits in the cognitive, emotional, and motor areas. The paper discusses the learning potential of WIVR and presents the design and preliminary evaluation of Wildcard, a novel WIVR system designed in cooperation with NDD specialists. Virtual environments are displayed on a smartphone placed inside a commercial low cost VR viewer while children interact with the virtual world through gaze focus and direction. An exploratory study performed at a care center sheds a light on the behavior of children with NDDs in wearable immersive virtual reality environments and highlights the learning potential as well as the possible difficulties of using this technology with this target group.

The paper describes the design of a robot companion for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. This work; being informed by general design guidelines reported in the current literature, lessons learned from our own previous experience, meetings with a team of therapists and special educators, and a comparison with 21 well-known robots; shows that the combination of robots' design features and roles would eventually made a robot companion unique and potentially powerful with respect to existing robots for this target group.

"Social stories" are short narratives that describe everyday life situations using paper or video and are widely used in interventions for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD), particularly in the Autistic Spectrum. Our research explores how to transform "traditional" social stories into wearable interactive immersive digital experiences. The paper describes a tool designed with therapists that enables everyone to autonomously develop and customize these "high tech" social stories, and, during a session of use, to control user's interaction and to automatically gather relevant behavioural information.

The 1st Workshop on Children and Recommender Systems (KidRec) is taking place in Como, Italy August 27th, 2017 in conjunction with the ACM RecSys 2017 conference. The goals of the workshop are threefold: (1) discuss and identify issues related to recommender systems used by children including specific challenges and limitations, (2) discuss possible solutions to the identified challenges and plan for future research, and (3) build a community to directly work on these important issues.

Our research explores social robots as learning tools for persons with Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD). The paper reports an empirical study that investigates engagement as a prerequisite for any learning process of NDD subjects. The study involved 5 persons in this target group and three robots (two research products developed at our lab, and a commercial one), which were used in sequence during individual therapeutic sessions at a care center. The results enable us to compare the engagement effects of different social robots and improves our understanding of the behavior of persons with NDD during robotic experiences.

Puffy is a learning and playful robotic companion for pre-school children. Designed in cooperation with a team of educators and inspired by Disney's Baymax, Puffy has a combination of features which makes it unique with respect to existing robots used in educational contexts. It is mobile and has an egg-shaped inflatable and soft body; it supports multimodal interaction, reacting to children's gestures and movements, facial expressions and emotions, and communicates using voice, lights, movements in space, and inside-out projections on its body. The paper describes the design of Puffy and discusses an exploratory study that has involved 79 children aged 4-5 at a local pre-school to investigate the Likeability of the robot and how much children enjoyed, engaged to and remembered some specific design features and play activities.

The paper presents Polipo, a tangible toy created for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD). Designed in collaboration with therapists, and tested with six children for five weeks, Polipo offers various opportunities for tangible interaction and a range of multisensory stimuli aimed at promoting the development of fine motor skills. One of the most distinguishing attributes of Polipo is its strong customization capability. The system provides a means for therapists to personalize luminous and sound stimuli; it is equipped with a set of add-ons that therapists can easily and quickly adjust on the basic structure to extend the physical affordances of the tool, offering new tactile stimuli and new manipulation experiences. These design solutions, and the promising results of the on-the-ground trials, highlight the potential of Polipo to address the unique learning needs of each single child with NDD.

Our research aims at helping children with intellectual disability (ID) to "learn through play" by interacting with digitally enriched physical toys. Inspired by the practice of Dolphin Therapy (a special form of Pet Therapy) and, specifically, by the activities that ID children perform at Dolphinariums, we have developed a "smart" stuffed dolphin called SAM that engages children in a variety of play tasks. SAM emits different stimuli (sound, vibration, and light) with its body in response to children's manipulation. Its behavior is integrated with lights and multimedia animations or video displayed in the ambient and can be customized by therapists to address the specific needs of each child.

Smart light technology offers new dynamic and interactive capabilities that extend the potential of traditional lighting systems of attracting people and affecting their mood, emotions, and behavior. Our research explores smart lights in the context of shop windows. The paper describes an extensive empirical study that has been performed for 5 weeks in a top-level fashion store located in one of the trendiest and crowed shopping areas in Milan (Italy), where we installed a sophisticate smart lighting system and created three different light configurations (static, dynamic, and interactive). The goal of the study is to explore the shopping experience in front of the shop in these different experimental conditions. Users' data were gathered in three ways: i) automatic collection of data from over >300.000 people passing by or stopping in front of the shop windows of the store; ii) live observation of approximately 600 passers-by; iii) questionnaires submitted to 62 persons in front of the shop. Users' data provide empirical evidence that interactive smart lights have the potential to increase the attractiveness of shopping windows, fostering engagement in passers-by, and in general improve the shopping experience in the brick-and-mortar stores.

Our research aims at supporting existing therapies for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The personal and social autonomy is the desired end state to be achieved to enable a smooth integration in the real world. We developed and tested a framework for storytelling and learning activities that exploits an immersive virtual reality viewer to interact with target users. Our system uses Google Cardboard platform to enhance existing therapies for IDD and ASD children, enabling caregivers to supervise and personalize single therapeutic sessions. This way curative meetings can be adapted for each child's specific need accordingly to the severity of their disabilities. We co-designed our system with experts from the medical sector, identifying features that allow patients to stay focused on the task to perform. Our approach triggers a learning process for a seamless assimilation of common behavioral skills useful in every day's life. This paper highlights the technologic challenges in healthcare and discusses cutting-edge interaction paradigms. Among those challenges, we try to identify the best solution to support advanced visual interfaces for an interactive storytelling experience. Furthermore, this work reports our preliminary experimental results from a still ongoing evaluation with IDD and ASD children and discusses the benefits and flaws of our approach. On the one hand, we explore children reaction to - and acceptance of - the viewer, on the other hand, therapists' ease of use when interacting with our framework. We conclude this paper with few considerations on our approach.

Our research explores new forms of technology-enhanced intervention for children with Intellectual Disability (ID) that exploits our Magic K-Room, an interactive multisensory smart space designed in cooperation with therapists and special educators at a local rehabilitation center. The Magic K-Room integrates smart objects, smart lights, and (immersive) multimedia contents. It also supports monitoring of brain-signals and automatic ambient adaptation, to dynamically personalize the smart space to the specific needs of each child. These features are enabled by a wearable device that automatically detects and interprets EEG signals.

This paper describes a contemporary concept store, offering a technology-rich blend of entertainment and interactivity targeted to help customers in their shopping experiences while shortening the time they waste queuing.

The fashion industry is one of the most flourishing fields for visual applications of IT. Due to the importance of the concept of look in fashion, the most advanced applications of computer graphics and sensing may fruitfully be exploited. The existence of low cost solutions in similar fields, such as the ones that empower the domestic video games market, suggest that analogous low cost solutions are viable and can foster innovation even in small and medium enterprises. In this paper the current state of development of vMannequin, a dynamic, user mimicking, user enacted virtual mannequin software solution, is presented. In order to allow users designing dress concepts, the application simulate the creation and fitting of clothes on virtual models. The interaction is sensor based, in order to both simplify the user interface, and create a richer involvement inside the application.

In this position paper, we take the experimental approach of putting algorithms aside, and reflect on what recommenders would be for people if they were not tied to technology. By looking at some of the shortcomings that current recommenders have fallen into and discussing their limitations from a human point of view, we ask the question: if freed from all limitations, what should, and what could, RecSys be? We then turn to the idea that life itself is the best recommender system, and that people themselves are the query. By looking at how life brings people in contact with options that suit their needs or match their preferences, we hope to shed further light on what current RecSys could be doing better. Finally, we look at the forms that RecSys could take in the future. By formulating our vision beyond the reach of usual considerations and current limitations, including business models, algorithms, data sets, and evaluation methodologies, we attempt to arrive at fresh conclusions that may inspire the next steps taken by the community of researchers working on RecSys.

We propose a new emotional, huggable, mobile, and configurable robot (Teo), which can address some of the still open therapeutic needs in the treatment of Developmental Disability (DD). Teo has been designed in partnership with a team of DD specialists, and it is meant to be used as an efficient and easy-to-use tool for caregivers. Teo is integrated with virtual worlds shown on large displays or projections and with external motion sensing devices to support various forms of full-body interaction and to engage DD persons in a variety of play activities that blend the digital and physical world and can be fully customized by therapists to meet the requirements of each single subject. Exploratory studies have been performed at two rehabilitation centres to investigate the potential of our approach. The positive results of these studies pinpoint that our system endeavors promising opportunities to offer new forms of interventions for DD people.

The core contribution of this paper lies in exploring new spaces of interaction for children with Intellectual Developmental Disorder (IDD). In the KROG (Kinect-RObot for Gaming) Project, we blend full-body interaction, virtual worlds on large screens, motion sensing technology, and mobile robots to support game-based interventions. This paper highlights the design challenges induced by this mix of technologies and interaction paradigms, presents the prototypes that have been iteratively designed and tested with 22 specialists, and discusses the lessons learned from our project.

Our research explores novel forms of smart spaces that support full body interaction with smart objects instrumented with audio, light, and motion sensors and actuators, virtual worlds on medium-large displays, and smart lights, and are integrated with cloud services for remote supervision and analysis of user behaviour. In this paper, we present the architecture and coordination infrastructure created in the Playful Supervised Smart Space (P3S) project, as well as initial designs for the Smart Object and Smart Space Gateway Components.

Limited studies exist that explore motionbased touchless applications for children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and investigate their design issues and the benefits they can bring to this target group. The paper reports a structured set of design guidelines that distill our experience gained from empirical studies and collaborations with therapeutic centers. These heuristics informed the design of three touchless games that were evaluated in a controlled study involving medium functioning ASD children at a therapeutic center. Our findings confirm the potential of motionbased touchless applications games for technologyenhanced interventions for this target group.

Our research explores the integration of motion-based touchless interaction with human-robots interaction to support game-based learning for children with intellectual disability. The paper discusses the design challenges of this novel approach and presents the design concepts of our initial prototypes.

When choosing an hotel, a restaurant or a movie, many people rely on the reviews available on the Web. However, this huge amount of opinions make it difficult for users to have a comprehensive vision of the crowd judgments and to make an optimal decision. In this work we provide evidence that automatic text summarization of reviews can be used to design Web applications able to effectively reduce the decision making effort in domains where decisions are based upon the opinion of the crowd.

The StreetSmart Project develops information services that integrate multiple (touch and touchless) interaction paradigms on personal devices and large public displays. It exploits personalization techniques in order to offer new engaging user experiences involving large amounts of multimedia contents.

With the increasingly low cost of motion-sensing technology, touchless interactive interfaces may become a new ingredient in the evolution of content intensive web applications from single-platform (desktop) to multi-platforms use. While the migration from desktop to mobile devices has been widely studied, there is limited understanding on how to include touchless interfaces in this "going multi-channel" evolution. The paper focuses on the design issues that are induced by this process. We propose a model-based design approach that supports information reuse and exploits a systematic mapping from content structures to interaction tasks and touchless gestures. We then describe a case study in the cultural heritage domain to exemplify our method.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has become the fastest growing disability in the United States in 2013. The disorder is characterized by a triad of symptoms related to lack of social interaction, deficits in the acquisition and expression of language, and repetitive patterns of behavior often accompanied by sensorimotor impairments. In our research, we explore the use of motion based touchless games for ASD children and develop innovative tools that can be autonomously used by teachers/therapists in school classes or therapeutic activities. The paper describes the design and preliminary evaluation of "Pixel Balance", a motion based touchless game conceived to promote imitative capability, body schema awareness, and social skills in ASD children.

Our understanding of the effectiveness of motion-based touchless games for autistic children is limited, because of the small amount of empirical studies and the limits of our current knowledge on autism. This paper offers two contributions. First, we provide a survey and a discussion of the existing literature. Second, we describe a field study that extends the current body of empirical evidence of the potential benefits of touchless motion-based gaming for autistic children. Our research involved five autistic children and one therapist in the experimentation of a set of Kinect games at a therapeutic center for a period of two and a half months. Using standardized therapeutic tests, observations during game sessions, and video analysis of over 20 hours of children's activities, we evaluated the learning benefits in relationship to attentional skills and explored several factors in the emotional and behavioral sphere. Our findings show improvements of the considered learning variables and help us to better understand how autistic children experience motion-based touchless play. Overall, our research sheds a light on the opportunities offered full body touchless games for therapy and education of these special users.

In a number of domains of interest for recommender systems, items are characterized by constrained and variable "capacity": the same product or service can be consumed by a limited number of users and the possibility of item consumption depends on contextual circumstances (e.g., time). Our work explores recommenders in the context of these "bounded" domains. We consider online hotel booking as a case study, and investigates if and how "missing" items (hotels that eventually becomes unavailable for users' consumption) affect the quality of recommendations. The paper proposes a technique for defining "missing" items as "best items", and presents an articulated empirical research in which recommendations for hotel online booking are evaluated in different experimental conditions with a user centric approach involving 142 participants.

A Recommender System (RS) filters a large amount of information to identify the items that are likely to be more interesting and attractive to a user. Recommendations are inferred on the basis of different user profile characteristics, in most cases including explicit ratings on a sample of suggested elements. RS research highlights that profile length, i. e., the number of collected ratings, is positively correlated to the accuracy of recommendations, which is considered an important quality factor for RSs. Still, gathering ratings adds a burden on the user, which may negatively affect the UX. A design tension seems to exist, induced by two conflicting requirements -- to raise accuracy by increasing the profile length, and to make the profiling process smooth for the user by limiting the number of ratings. The paper presents a wide empirical study (1080 users involved) which explores this issue. Our work attempts to identify which of the two contrasting forces influenced by profile length -- recommendations accuracy and burden of the rating process - has stronger effects on the perceived quality of the UX with a RS.

Motion-based touchless interaction empowers users to interact using movements and gestures, and without the burden of physical contact with technology (e.g., data gloves, body markers, or remote controllers). Most motion-based touchless applications are designed for interaction "in-the-large", where users engage with medium or large displays. Our research explores motion-based touchless interaction "in-the- small" that involves only small displays (of the size, for example, of smart phone screens). We have applied this novel paradigm to develop interactive applications for household appliances, discovering that the "in-the-small" feature raises a number of challenging design issues, exemplified in the paper through a case study.

One of the unresolved issues when designing a recommender system is the number of ratings -- i.e., the profile length -- that should be collected from a new user before providing recommendations. A design tension exists, induced by two conflicting requirements. On the one hand, the system must collect "enough"ratings from the user in order to learn her/his preferences and improve the accuracy of recommendations. On the other hand, gathering more ratings adds a burden on the user, which may negatively affect the user experience. Our research investigates the effects of profile length from both a subjective (user-centric) point of view and an objective (accuracy-based) perspective. We carried on an offline simulation with three algorithms, and a set of online experiments involving overall 960 users and four recommender algorithms, to measure which of the two contrasting forces influenced by the number of collected ratings -- recommendations relevance and burden of the rating process -- has stronger effects on the perceived quality of the user experience. Moreover, our study identifies the potentially optimal profile length for an explicit, rating based, and human controlled elicitation strategy.

Recommender Systems (RSs) help users search large amounts of digital contents and services by allowing them to identify the items that are likely to be more attractive or useful. RSs play an important persuasion role, as they can potentially augment the users’ trust towards in an application and orient their decisions or actions towards specific directions. This article explores the persuasiveness of RSs, presenting two vast empirical studies that address a number of research questions. First, we investigate if a design property of RSs, defined by the statistically measured quality of algorithms, is a reliable predictor of their potential for persuasion. This factor is measured in terms of perceived quality, defined by the overall satisfaction, as well as by how users judge the accuracy and novelty of recommendations. For our purposes, we designed an empirical study involving 210 subjects and implemented seven full-sized versions of a commercial RS, each one using the same interface and dataset (a subset of Netflix), but each with a different recommender algorithm. In each experimental configuration we computed the statistical quality (recall and F-measures) and collected data regarding the quality perceived by 30 users. The results show us that algorithmic attributes are less crucial than we might expect in determining the user’s perception of an RS’s quality, and suggest that the user’s judgment and attitude towards a recommender are likely to be more affected by factors related to the user experience. Second, we explore the persuasiveness of RSs in the context of large interactive TV services. We report a study aimed at assessing whether measurable persuasion effects (e.g., changes of shopping behavior) can be achieved through the introduction of a recommender. Our data, collected for more than one year, allow us to conclude that, (1) the adoption of an RS can affect both the lift factor and the conversion rate, determining an increased volume of sales and influencing the user’s decision to actually buy one of the recommended products, (2) the introduction of an RS tends to diversify purchases and orient users towards less obvious choices (the long tail), and (3) the perceived novelty of recommendations is likely to be more influential than their perceived accuracy. Overall, the results of these studies improve our understanding of the persuasion phenomena induced by RSs, and have implications that can be of interest to academic scholars, designers, and adopters of this class of systems.

In the domain of disabled children learning, requirements are heterogeneous and ever changing, because of these learners' peculiar characteristics and the nature of their educational needs. Technology for this complex problem space should be highly flexible, evolvable, and easy modifiable to address the developmental, emotional, and cognitive level of each single child. The paper describes an open-ended environment that supports the creation and customization of tangible learning experiences for disable children learning and meets the above requirements. The toolkit implements an End User Development paradigm and a Meta-Design approach, as educators, teachers and therapists, can use it autonomously, without depending on skilled programmers. In its current version, the system is a model-based and pattern-based web application framework, and has been iteratively designed, prototyped, and evaluated along a period of three years in partnership with therapists and teachers at a local primary school.

Interactive technology for disabled children at school is typically used as an assistive tool or a learning facilitator, and promotes inclusion by enabling a more effective participation to school activities by students with special needs. In this paper, we discuss how we can achieve a wider form of inclusive education by involving non-disabled children as co-designers of technology for their disabled schoolmates. We describe examples of this approach in the context of an ongoing project at a local school, involving tangible technology.

The purpose of our research is to support cognitive, motor, and emotional development of severely disabled children in the school context. We designed and implemented a set of novel learning experiences that are both low-cost and easily customizable, and combine the visual communication paradigm of Augmented Alternative Communication (ACC) with multimedia tangible technology. Using an application framework developed at our lab (called "Talking Paper"), teachers and therapists can easily associate conventional paper based elements (e.g., PCS cards, drawings, pictures) to multimedia resources (videos, sounds, animations), and create playful interactive spaces that are customized to the specific learning needs of each disabled child. Paper based elements work as visual representations for the concepts children must learn, as communication devices, and as physical affordances for interacting with multimedia resources. The paper presents the approach and its application in a real school context, highlighting the benefits for both disabled and non disabled children. The latter were involved as co-designers of multimedia contents and learning activities. Their creative participation favored group-binding and increased tolerance and sense of community in the classroom, so that the overall project became a means for real inclusive education.

Since the nineties, storytelling has received increasing attention in the HCI, IDC, and AI communities, exploring the potential of interactivity and multimedia as a means to promote engagement, enjoyment, fun, to foster new forms of children's creativity, and to increase the educational benefits of traditional storytelling for this target group. The time seems right to look at the field with critical eyes and validate the claims put forward regarding the positive effects of interactive storytelling technology for children, as well as the effectiveness of existing design and evaluation approaches. The purpose of this full-day IDC 2010 workshop is to bring together researchers from a wide spectrum of disciplines who share a common interest in understanding these challenges and to create a research agenda that can orient application and theory in the domain of interactive storytelling for children.

Does usability of a web-based communication artifact affect brand, i.e., the set of beliefs, emotions, attitudes, or qualities that people mentally associate to the entity behind that artifact? Intuitively, the answer is “yes”: usability is a fundamental aspect of the quality of the experience with a website, and a “good” experience with a “product” or its reifications tends to translate into “good” brand perception. To date, however, the existence of a connection between web usability and brand perception is shown through anecdotic arguments, and is not supported by published systematic research. This paper discusses a study that empirically investigates this correlation in a more rigorous, analytical, and replicable way. Our main contribution is twofold: on the one hand, we provide empirical evidence to the heuristic principle that web usability influences branding, and we do that through four between subjects controlled experiments that involved 120 subjects. On the other hand, we inform the study with a systematic value-oriented approach to the user experience, and thus provide a conceptual framework that can be reused in other experimental settings, either for replicating our study, or for designing similar studies focusing on the correlation of web branding vs. design factors other than usability.

Many existing studies discuss the participation of children as design partners in the development of technology. In this paper, we shift the focus from technology to experience, and propose to broaden the role of children to become experience designer partners. We exemplify our approach by discussing a case study in the educational domain. We conducted a contextual inquiry study in a local primary school for over three months, working with twenty four children aged 10--11 who used an online tool for cooperative hyperstorytelling. Our research shows that children of this age can participate in experience design not only as informants but also as co-designers. This intergenerational partnership brings a number of educational benefits to children involved in this process. It also suggests innovative solutions in the way technology can be exploited in an educational setting.

The paper introduces the field of Interaction Design for Marginalized Young People, which is the matter of discussion during the homonymous workshop held at IDC 2008. We summarize backgrounds, problems, and topics for this emerging field. We argue that awareness for the digital divide in today's societies has to become a major concern, even now when inclusion is no longer a matter of access to computers and the Internet only, but a matter of why and how. The paper gives a short overview on the papers that have been selected for presentation at the workshop. These contributions span from describing projects in developing countries to theoretical aspects of the field to practical software design solutions for overcoming the gap.

An infosuasive web application is mainly intended to be at the same time informative and persuasive, i.e., it aims at supporting knowledge needs and it has also the (declared or not declared) goal of influencing user's opinions, attitudes and behaviors. Most web applications, in fact, are infosuasive (except those whose aim is mainly operational). In this paper, we investigate the complex set of elements that informs the very early design of infosuasive web applications. We propose a conceptual framework aimed at supporting the actors involved in this process to integrate their different viewpoints, to organize the variety of issues that need to be analyzed, to find a direction in the numerous design options, and to represent the results of this activity in an effective way.

Multiplayer games are becoming an important part of Internet use, and have been the subject of many theoretical and empirical studies. Still, relatively few researches investigate multiplayer Internet games that are designed for young children and for educational purposes. This paper focuses on the educational effectiveness of this class of systems, and introduces some heuristics for its evaluation. We also report an empirical study that involved eighty-five elementary school children and measured the educational effectiveness of an online multiplayer game. We used both learning benefits analysis and empirical assessment of our heuristics, comparing the findings of the two evaluation methods.

The paper discusses the design and evaluation of a museum exhibition named The Fire and The Mountain, where we exploited hybrid (i.e., digital and physical) artifacts as well as the paradigm of tangible interaction to enhance children' experience and to support engagement, learning, and social behavior.

Requirements engineering has traditionally focused on identifying functional and non functional requirements to inform design, and to ensure that the product under development accommodates the needs of the end users, the goals of the different stakeholders, as well as the technological, organizational, and business constraints. For requirements analysis of content-intensive interactive applications, we propose to take a wider perspective driven by the concepts of brand, brand value, and communication goal. We highlight the pervasive impact of this kind of "non functional requirements" on various design dimensions of content-intensive interactive applications - contents, lay-out, information architecture, interaction, services - in order to create not only a functional or informative experience, but also an emotional relationship with the artifact and the brand underneath it. The paper discuss a case study to exemplify our approach, sets the founding elements for brand&communication-driven requirements analysis in content-intensive interactive applications, and provides a modeling framework for representing the results of this process.

Storytelling, edutainment, and collaborative interaction are all powerful paradigms to promote learning in young kids. The FaTe2 project offers a combination of these paradigms by providing a web based, multi-user, two and three dimensions virtual space where children (aged 7--11) can meet, chat, explore, play, and perform storytelling activities in collaboration. The paper describes the background of FaTe2, its educational motivations, its design solutions, and its implementation approach.

An enterprise framework denotes a "reusable, "semi-complete" application skeleton that can be easily adapted to produce custom applications in a specific business domain. CHEF is an enterprise framework for multi-device hypermedia applications in cultural heritage. Its goal is to reduce the cost of application development and to improve the quality of the final product. Differently from existing frameworks, which are typically conceived as tools for programmers, CHEF adopts an end-user development approach. It has been built for and with "domain experts" (cultural heritage specialists). It provides a set of user-friendly tools that hide the implementation complexity and can be used, by domain experts with no technical know-how, to design-by-reuse their hypermedia, to instantiate their designs with the proper contents, and to deliver the final application on different platforms (web-enabled desktop, PDA, CD-ROM).

It is indubitable that usability inspection of complex hypermedia is still an "art," in the sense that a great deal is left to the skills, experience, and ability of the inspectors. Training inspectors is difficult and often quite expensive. The Systematic Usability Evaluation (SUE) inspection technique has been proposed to help usability inspectors share and transfer their evaluation know-how, to simplify the hypermedia inspection process for newcomers, and to achieve more effective and efficient evaluation results. SUE inspection is based on the use of evaluation patterns, called abstract tasks, which precisely describe the activities to be performed by evaluators during inspection. This article highlights the advantages of this inspection technique by presenting its empirical validation through a controlled experiment. Two groups of novice inspectors were asked to evaluate a commercial hypermedia CD-ROM by applying the SUE inspection or traditional heuristic evaluation. The comparison was based on three major dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Results indicate a clear advantage of the SUE inspection over the traditional inspection on all dimensions, demonstrating that abstract tasks are efficient tools to drive the evaluator's performance.

SUE inspection is a novel usability evaluation method for hypermedia, which falls into the category of inspection methods. Its primary goal is to favor a systematic usability evaluation (SUE), for supplying hypermedia usability inspectors with a structured flow of activities, allowing them to obtain more reliable, comparable, and cost-effective evaluation results. This is obtained especially due to the use of evaluation patterns, called abstract tasks (AT), which describe in details the activities that evaluators must carry out during inspection. AT helps share and transfer evaluation know-how among different evaluators, thus making it easier to learn the SUE inspection method by newcomers. A further notable advantage provided by the SUE inspection over other existent approaches is that it focuses on navigation and information structures, making evident some problems that other "surface-oriented" approaches might not reveal. This paper describes the SUE inspection for hypermedia. It also reports on a validation experiment, involving 28 evaluators, that has shown the major effectiveness and efficiency of the SUE inspection for hypermedia, with respect to traditional heuristic evaluation techniques.

In the usability inspection of complex hypermedia a great deal is left to the skills, experience, and ability of the inspectors. The SUE inspection technique has been proposed to help usability inspectors share and transfer their evaluation know-how, make it easier the hypermedia inspection process for newcomers, and achieve more effective and efficient evaluations. The SUE inspection is based on the use of evaluation patterns, called Abstract Tasks, which precisely describe the activities to be performed by evaluators during inspection. This paper presents an empirical validation of this inspection technique: two groups of novice inspectors have been asked to evaluate a commercial hypermedia CD-ROM applying the SUE inspection or the traditional heuristic evaluation technique. Results have shown a clear advantage of the SUE inspection over the heuristic evaluation, demonstrating that Abstract Tasks are efficient tools to drive evaluator's performance.

This paper presents a systematic approach to the heuristic evaluation of hypermedia that specifically addresses the peculiar features of this class of systems. We propose a set of hypermedia-specific usability attributes and define general "patterns of evaluation activities" called abstract tasks that can be performed by usability experts to check such attributes systematically. The usage of abstract tasks makes application inspection more effective, since it guides the work of evaluators and supports standardization across different evaluators. Our approach is model-based since we use a hypermedia design model (HDM) to identify the constituents of an application that represent the "focus of interest" for the evaluation, to decompose general usability principles into hypermedia-specific attributes, and finally to formulate abstract tasks in a precise way. To show the effectiveness of our method, we discuss the most significant usability problems discovered in eight commercially available hypermedia CD-ROM's.

Hypertext development should benefit from a systematic, structured development, especially in the case of large and complex applications. A structured approach to hypertext development suggests the notion of authoring-in-the-large . Authoring-in-the-large allows the description of overall classes of information elements and navigational structures of complex applications without much concern with implementation details, and in a system-independent manner. The paper presents HDM (Hypertext Design Model), a first step towards defining a general purpose model for authoring-in-the-large. Some of the most innovative features of HDM are: the notion of perspective ; the identification of different categories of links (structural links, application links, and perspective links) with different representational roles; the distinction between hyperbase and access structures ; and the possibility of easily integrating the structure of a hypertext application with its browsing semantics. HDM can be used in different manners: as a modeling device or as an implementation device. As a modeling device, it supports producing high level specifications of existing or to-be-developed applications. As an implementation device, it is the basis for designing tools that directly support application development. One of the central advantages of HDM in the design and practical construction of hypertext applications is that the definition of a significant number of links can be derived automatically from a conceptual-design level description. Examples of usage of HDM are also included.

Abstract Hypertext development is still, for the most part, at the ‘handcrafting’ level, where each hypertext document must be hand‐designed. We present a compiler which takes hyperdocuments designed using a model‐based approach and generates stacks executable in Hyper Card. This compiler is implemented in standard SQL over a relational database representation of a hyperdocument designed using the hypermedia design model (HDM). The compiling approach, even though illustrated with HDM, can be used with any ‘structured’ design methodology.

The paper describes a new type of tool, which has been defined to support complex applications (such as the ones typically found in office environments). The relevant features of this tool are the following: