Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming humans’ activities through continuous collaboration in domains where AI-supported decisions affect humans and societies. In this context, the focus should shift toward the development of Symbiotic AI (SAI) systems that support humans rather than replace them. This contribution presents a set of Success Criteria (SC) that can be used to evaluate such SAI systems by determining whether the requirements of symbiosis are met. The paper also includes a preliminary validation of the criteria through a pilot user study.

The information published in newspapers reflects the opinions and viewpoints that society holds on the principal public issues. Some topics can be particularly sensitive to gender biases, such as technology, politics, or sports, where, despite the growing relevance of women, the media tends to focus on men as protagonists and sources of reference. When women do appear, they are not treated equally. Analyzing how the information is presented from a gender perspective is necessary to assess progress toward equality in the journalism sector and society at large. These analyses are very costly to produce due to the time required and the shortage of experts in the field, so they are not as frequent as would be ideal. In this paper, we introduce IRIS, a tool that helps experts identify gender biases in news publications. The tool is designed to process content qualitatively and quantitatively, using variables defined in collaboration with researchers with extensive experience in gender studies. This first version of IRIS aims to capture human expertise and automatically generate a basic report to present analysis results from a gender perspective.

Online hostility in social media, including hate speech, trolling, and cyberbullying, can seriously harm people's mental and physical health, and yet it is often addressed after harm has already occurred. While prior research focused on detecting such behaviors, this study proposes and evaluates a gamified, user-centered approach to prevent and regulate hostile interactions while preserving user agency. To this end, we have designed and developed an innovative gamified algorithm that combines elements such as Corrected Hostility Level (CHL), Politeness Points, green cards, apology and appeal mechanisms, user-selected politeness thresholds, Politeness Badges, and a Positive Reputation Score (PRS). The proposed system enables users to restrict unwanted interactions without requiring the platform to read private messages or impose uniform moderation rules. The proposed methods were implemented in Gegli Social Network, and the evaluation analyzed 36,367 reports concerning 16,167 reported users and 97,818 visits to the politeness panel by 1,478 users. Moreover, the PRS analysis used 132,588 testimonial records and identified 24,151 ranked receivers, showing a strongly right-skewed reputation distribution in which early badge levels were widely reachable and higher badges remained rare. The study results suggest that the gamified mechanisms were associated with reduced hostile interactions, motivated users to apologize to each other for their bad behavior, and personalized their communication by democratically restricting their communication to decide with whom they wanted to communicate, while mostly selecting the most open threshold. This is to encourage safer and more prosocial online behavior. Gender differences in the use of the proposed method were also studied.

Extended Reality (XR) technologies offer many possibilities to support collaboration between remote and local team members. However, in a scenario with multiple devices and multiple interaction options, including virtual, augmented and the continuum of realities among them, it is still unclear how to select the right option to make collaboration more efficient. To provide some design insights in this context, this paper presents a comparative study of collaboration behaviours and outcomes when using different XR technologies, where X stands for Virtual or Augmented. In our experimental setup, pairs of users collaborated on three tasks drawn from visual analytics, each designed to require a different level of synchronization: low, medium, and high. We conducted a study with 40 participants (20 dyads), who performed tasks in two conditions: Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). All used the same equipment and interactions; only the immersive environment differed. The results suggest that collaboration outcomes differed only in high-coupling tasks, with AR showing a performance advantage. This may stem from a greater difficulty of synchronizing actions when perceiving a partner through avatars rather than directly. However, no significant differences were observed in collaboration dynamics, and the choice of XR technology did not appear to affect collaboration patterns. These findings suggest that, for collaborative analytical tasks comparable to those in this study, collaborators can choose the XR mode that best fits their preferences and current needs without concern about hindering teamwork.

In this exploratory research, a gamification approach for crowdsourcing fake account detection in social networks has been proposed and evaluated for the first time. Gamification usually tries to satisfy the users’ psychological needs. However, motivation could also be based on human physiological needs. Among these needs are health, shelter, and clothes. In the gamification world, we can translate them into monetary or cash rewards. We have investigated the effects of both these rewards on users’ motivations in participating and detecting fake accounts by conducting two in-the-wild exploratory experiments and two surveys. The experimental results showed that users prefer physiological rewards over psychological rewards, and an increase in the reward (0.75 euro in this study) resulted in a 365% increase in user participation and a 28.88% decrease in number of accurate reports in the first experiment. Similarly, in the second experiment, we observed that higher monetary rewards resulted in higher user acquisition and higher user engagement, but the quality of the reports was 10% lower than the low monetary rewards. This indicates that physiological rewards can potentially make users over-motivated or, in other words, overgamified. To tackle this problem, we proposed a gamification approach that benefits from both psychological and physiological rewards and gradually increases them. The evaluation results showed a 15% increase in the quality of the reports, a 26% increase in interaction time using the proposed method, and a 19% increase in user acquisition to lower monetary rewards. It also showed a 57% increase in commitment to participating in the survey compared with other groups. Both survey results show that around 40% of the users prefer to receive between 0.50 and 1 euro for their services. Also, women showed more quality responses and commitment in completing the participation than men.

Abstract In this article, we have introduced Gamispotify. For the first time, in a social network-based environment, and by benefiting from gamification and crowdsourcing, Gamispotify recommends music to the users based on their personal values. The proposed method has been compared to another published article by conducting two experiments and surveys on 32 application participants. Experimental results indicate that user engagement has significantly increased using the proposed method. Spending time on the application increased by 299.48%, the music play count increased by 150%, and receiving music recommendations increased by 244.41%. Statistical analysis using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test confirmed these improvements were significant (p < 0.05). Moreover, survey results support these findings and show a notable increase in user satisfaction with the proposed music recommendation system compared with the previous work (p = 0.019). It also indicates that the proposed method successfully motivated users to discover new songs (p = 0.043). We have also found that social networking features, recommendations based on personal values, and gamification have positively impacted the users’ motivation to use the music streaming application.

In the last years, there has been an increasing amount of data published in different sources, formats, and structures that could be useful for various purposes: learning about a topic, discovering trends, and monitoring public opinion, among others. To facilitate access to this data and, more importantly, to identify the most interesting information in the set, in this poster, we present an interactive tool aimed at extracting and processing collections of unstructured text data to create a knowledge graph that users can explore and edit. The tool has been designed in three modules: gathering information, processing texts, building relations, and visualizing the knowledge base. The user can interact with these steps, particularly by exploring the visualization and changing the concepts and the relations using either a graphical or textual view.

This work focuses on exploring the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence to assist end-users in creating immersive experiences. We present a prototype that supports the creation and edition of virtual environments using speech commands expressed in natural language.

The underrepresentation of women in Computer Science and Engineering is a pervasive issue, impacting the enrolment and graduation rates of female students as well as the presence of women in leadership positions in academia and industry. The European Network For Gender Balance in Informatics (EUGAIN) COST action seeks to share data, experiences, best practices, and lessons from failures, and to provide actionable tools that may contribute to the advancement of gender balance in the field. This paper summarises results from the Ph.D./Postdoc to Professor workgroup that were gathered in two booklets of best practices. Specifically, we introduce the Equality Maturity Model (EMM), a conceptual tool aimed at supporting organisations in measuring how they are doing concerning equality and identifying potential areas of improvement and that was inspired by both booklets.

Moving to a responsible engineering educational approach is a trend nowadays since the artifacts created by engineers have an impact on society and the environment. Ethics has become a key learning outcome value by many accreditation bodies, but ethics education can be implemented in many different ways. This paper advocates for an educational approach not only based on the introduction of stand-alone ethics courses but also on pouring values throughout the curriculum in any courses related to creating technologies. We describe here two examples of assignments that follow a microscale embedded ethics approach and active learning tasks to engage students in the exploration of biases and ethical issues concerning user interface design and data visualizations, respectively. The first example has a hidden goal of identifying gender-based biases in websites by applying reverse design thinking techniques on existing websites. The second example uses three different tasks to explore and apply ethics in data integration and visualizations by designing multisensorial visualizations that could serve more diverse audiences, applying value-based design in a final project, and elaborating an essay on existing unethical AI-based tools. Both experiences, which students appreciated, helped to raise awareness of ethical issues and the responsibility of computer science engineers.

This paper briefly overviews the elements that affect user trust, security, and privacy in social media applications. We analyzed how gamification, personalization, decentralization, design, content, transparency, demography, and performance can affect user trust, privacy, and security in social media. Then, we reviewed common approaches hackers use to attack users on social media platforms. Approaches like phishing, social engineering, credential stuffing, malware distributions, fake profiles, catfishing, man-in-the-middle, session hijacking, and cross-site scripting (XSS) were reviewed. Then, we share our experiences facing this type of threat in the Gegli social network and describe how we have tackled these problems. This paper can help social media and other software applications or website developers that benefit from social networking features to familiarize themselves with the common security threats and the approaches that can be used to tackle them.

Abstract Cross-reality media technology creates alternate reality experiences in which the physical and the virtual world are interconnected and influence each other through a network of sensors and actuators. Despite technological advances, the landscape of cross-reality technology as an enabler of alternate reality educational experiences has not been explored yet. The technical expertise required to set up and program such mixed environments is too high to engage the problem owners (i.e. educational experts) in the design process and, hence, user-driven innovation remains challenging. In this paper we explore the co-creation of cross-reality experiences for educational games. We created a no-programming toolkit that provides a visual language and interface abstractions to quickly build prototypes of cross-reality interactions. The toolkit supports experience prototyping and allows designers to coproduce, with educational experts, meaningful scenarios while they create, try out and reconfigure their prototypes. We report on a workshop with 36 educators where the toolkit was used to ideate cross-reality games for education. We discuss use cases of game-based learning applications developed by the participants that follow different pedagogical strategies and combine different physical and virtual spaces and times. We outline implications for the design of cross-reality interactions in educational settings that trigger further research and technological developments.

Immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality afford to enrich the physical environment with a layer of digital information, providing new experiences that can support and improve the daily life of people in their homes. We present insights from a field study with nine families to understand user experience and expectations of Mobile Augmented Reality at home and reveal emerging designs. We deployed a mobile application that provided a contextual representation of the WiFi signal through visualizations integrated in the physical space. Each family lived with the prototype for one week, with a pre- and post-study interview session. We found that Augmented Reality has potential to (1) foster people's autonomy and control (e.g., configuration of technology and problem solving), as well as (2) enhance people's knowledge and awareness about domestic technology (e.g., understanding technical terms and awareness of invisible infrastructures).

Standalone Head-Mounted Displays open up new possibilities to study full-room, bodily interactions in immersive environments. User studies with these devices, however, are complex to design, setup and run, since remote access is required to track the user view and actions, detect errors and perform adjustments during experimental sessions. We designed IXCI as a research support tool to streamline immersive user studies by explicitly addressing these issues. Through a use case, we show how the tool effectively supports the researcher in tasks such as remote debugging, rapid prototyping, run-time parameter configuration, monitoring participants’ progress, providing help to users, recovering from errors and minimizing data loss.

Though virtual reality has been used for more than one decade to support learning, technology is now mature and cheap enough, and students have the required digital fluency to reach real settings. Immersive technologies have also demonstrated that they not only are engaging, but they can also reinforce learning and improve memory. This work presents a preliminary study on the advantages of using an immersive experience to help young students understand genetic editing techniques. We have relied upon the CHIC Immersive Bubble Chart, a VR (Virtual Reality) multi-device visualization of the most relevant topics in the domain. We tested the CHIC Immersive Bubble Chart by asking a group of 29 students to explore the information space by interacting with two different devices: a desktop and a VR headset. The results show that they mainly preferred the VR headset finding it more engaging and useful. As a matter of fact, during the evaluation, the students kept exploring the space even after the assigned time slot.

This paper presents findings on participants of a massive open online course named "Educational Robotics for all" developed under Open edX platform. The document describes the organization and structure of the MOOC and some of its preliminary results. As an example, Module 2 about Gender and STEAM is presented and discussed.

Traditional therapy methods for people with cognitive disabilities involve long periods of time performing exercises that can be tedious or unattractive for both patients and the professionals who work with them in specialized centers. In this work we aim at investigating the possibilities that combining music and virtual reality technology might offer for improving this scenario. Following this purpose, we applied an action research approach to co-develop with stakeholders a highly-configurable and accessible application to support exercising abilities usually targeted in rehabilitation therapy, such as coordination and motor skills, memory, and spatial perception. The results of an experiment carried out with both professionals and patients showed promising results, suggesting that this type of technology could improve the rehabilitation process, and make it more engaging.

Taxonomies are semantic resources that help to categorize and add meaning to data. In a hyperconnected world where information is generated at a rate that exceeds human capacities to process and make sense of it, such semantic resources can help to access relevant information more efficiently by extracting knowledge from large and unstructured data sets. Taxonomies are related to specific domains of knowledge in which they identify relevant topics. However, they have to be validated by experts to guarantee that its terms and relations are meaningful. In this paper, we introduce a semiautomatic taxonomy generation tool for supporting domain experts in building taxonomies that are then used to automatically create semantic visualizations of data. Our proposal combines automatic techniques to extract, sort and categorize terms, and empowers domain experts to take part at any stage of the process by providing a visual edition tool. We tested the tool’s usability in two use cases from different domains and languages. Results show that all the functionalities are easy to use and interact with. Lessons learned from this experience will guide the design of a utility evaluation involving domain experts interested in data analysis and knowledge modeling.

Building an electronic circuit is an error-prone activity for novice users; many errors can occur, such as incorrect wirings or wrong component values. This work explores the use of Augmented Reality (AR) as a technology to mitigate the issues that arise when users construct circuits. We present a study that investigates the effectiveness, usability, and cognitive load of AR visual instructions for circuit prototyping tasks. A mobile-based, window-on-the-world AR tool is compared to traditional media such as paper-based or monitor-displayed electronic drawings. Results show that superimposing components and instructions through AR reduces the number of errors, allows users to easily troubleshoot them and reduces users' mental workload.

Augmented Reality1 (AR) and Pervasive games can be combined to improve citizens awareness about their urban environment. While AR will provide additional information in situ, pervasive games can be used to implement playable cities that support informal learning about the environment through ludic activities performed physically in the same environment. In this paper, we present a prototype of an AR pervasive game application for an Android device that invites citizens to play and acquire knowledge about their city.

The Virtual Reality (VR) technology offers new possibilities to implement Geographical Information Systems (GIS), allowing the user to visualize and interact with map interfaces in more natural and immersive way. Moreover, they can provide the user with a wide field of view similar to the one obtained when using large displays. In this paper, we present a VR application that allows the user to display and interact with a GIS map using different types of interaction modalities.

Social networks are a subject of great interest worldwide. Year after year we have experienced an increase in the number of new users and, even, the creation of new technologies (i.e. augmented reality, 360º cameras, …) and new social networks. However, this phenomenon is contrasted with the appearance of automatic programs (bots) and fake news that can affect the quality of published information. This paper presents the state of the art of the quality of the information found in different social networks. In addition, we propose a series of learnt lessons to be followed in order to develop a theoretical application that measures the quality of a user generated information for a given event.

In this paper, we propose a tool to build taxonomies in a semi-automatic way. Taxonomies are key structures to model and categorize knowledge focusing on the semantics. Designing a taxonomy means finding meaningful concepts respect to a domain of application. This complex task requires the involvement of domain experts to define a representative dictionary. To keep a human-in-the-loop approach, taxonomies have been mostly created manually with a great cost in time and resources. Our goal is to design a general-purpose and multi-language tool that will automatize the process of building a taxonomy from a document corpus. The proposed architecture can be used in different domains, as well as in different languages.

Despite the increasing popularity of Virtual Reality (VR) technology, the designers of these type of environments stick lack the necessary support for designing effective and usable interfaces for their creations. This works aim to provide support to VR designers by comparing the efficiency (task completion time and error rate) and usability of four types of menu configurations with different geometry (radial and linear) and position in the world (non-diegetic positions and spatial positions). We present the results of two experiments that suggest that in both non-diegetic and spatial menus the task completion time is smaller on radial menus than linear menus. In the case of error rate and usability, no statistic significant differences between radial and linear menus were found regardless their position in the VR environment.

Building physical spaces interconnected with virtual worlds is a complex task that requires high technical knowledge and hours of programming and, as a matter of fact, is relegated to the work of expert professionals. The goal of this research is to lower the development threshold through the design of an end-user toolkit that provides a visual integrated environment for the rapid prototyping of cross-reality interactions. A user study with 8 participants showed the effectiveness of our approach and uncovered design opportunities and challenges for supporting the development of cross-reality environments.

In this paper we present VR GREP, an immersive End User Development (EUD) tool that supports authoring and modifying general purpose immersive VR environments, without having technical knowledge. The system aims to facilitate exploring the potential of immersive tools to support situated design practices.

With this half-day workshop we will offer a venue to colleagues in Arts and Humanities, designers and computer scientists at large for sharing their experiences about raising creativity levels when running collaborative design sessions. We will target researchers interested in collaborative design involving different types of users including adults, children, teenagers and senior citizens, as much as truly intergenerational experiences. We will hear about the challenges they face in terms of keeping participants engaged and stimulate their individual and social creativity. We will aim at discussing the practicalities of setting up a collaborative design study that are so crucial to its success but rarely reported in literature. There will also be time for exploring more theoretical issues such as when a stimulus is genuinely thought provoking and when instead it becomes overpowering. We will debate on how to measure creativity in this setting and whether it is possible to relate and attribute it to specific activities and roles played by participants.

Novel interfaces are always welcome to assess different ways in which children may engage in learning activities. Multi-touch interactive systems are being increasingly exploited in the last few years for learning purposes, because they are able to foster collaboration in children. However, there are other factors that need special attention when trying to get children to collaborate and work in teams, like level of fun and simplicity of tools provided, for instance. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a platform aiming at supporting children in the co-design of a game conceived to teach children how to respond to an emergency.

The tremendous amount of different input devices and interactive environments envisioned by researchers produces a severe challenge for the development of ubiquitous interaction. Toolkits that support the rapid setup of ubiquitous environments reduce the effort in arranging the technological medium and have the potential to lower prerequisite knowledge and automate low-level programming tasks. In this paper, we present our work-in-progress approach: a toolkit that combines physical and digital components into a unique environment to allow the rapid setup of device ecologies.

In this working paper we present the design and setup of a workshop environment that empowers users with tools to create and share digital narratives associated with physical artifacts. The approach focuses on two main design choices: (1) physical embodiment, by having people directly interact with the physical objects we want to augment and, (2) situated social interactions, by offering the possibility to share personal ideas and comment on others, to collaboratively produce stories about augmented objects. We also report about the main evaluation results we got in a workshop in which we studied users needs with respect to tangible interactive experiences in exhibitions of museums.

Software engineering analysis and design methods are mainly guided by objective principles and criteria, whilst design thinking is usually fueled by subjective and people-based criteria like emotions, aesthetics or cultural and personal resonance. Complex interactive systems require a mixed approach where the benefits of both disciplines are respected: engineering and creativity, rationality and emotions, quality-centered and people-centered. This is the main purpose of a software tool, named CoDICE (COdesigning DIgital Cultural Encounters), that is being developed within the meSch EU project that is aimed at co-designing smart objects for enhanced encounters with cultural heritage. CoDICE adds persistence and traceability to the co-design activities and makes it possible to extend ideas discussion beyond collocated meetings. It also provides mechanisms to revisit design products and generate informed design rationale.

Ubiquitous computing combined with web 2.0 technologies might contribute to develop a culture of participation in emergency management (EM) by aligning the efforts and capabilities of official agencies and citizens. For citizen participation to be possible organizations in charge of EM need to realize that involving citizens does not interfere with their protocols and citizens need to be empowered to move beyond the role of passive informants. In this paper we describe how organizations perceive this participation as a step further to understand how to reach a more participative model and the benefits that technology and sociotechnical systems might bring to such model.

The design of the user interfaces for educational games (EGs) poses specific challenges, as this feature does not only have an impact on the game playability but can also be used to reinforce learning or to establish associations between concepts. However, implementing advanced in-game interactions can be an issue due to the wide range of technologies for defining input modalities, actions and events that game designers need to consider. In this working paper, we propose an approach to ease the development of educational games that go one step beyond classical mouse and keyboard interaction and provide interaction alternatives within the same game rationale. Our proposal is based on the integration of a game design model and an ubicomp interaction toolkit that manages heterogeneous devices.

This Studio will involve participants creating interactions with physical and digital elements. They will have the opportunity to use a toolkit we developed that combines physical and digital widgets into a unique environment to allow the rapid setup of device ecologies. Therefore, participants will be able to explore how the toolkit support to physical/digital interaction gives people with low, when no, technical skills the possibility to rapidly prototype interactions among heterogeneous devices, thus blurring the boundaries between the physical and the digital world.

This work aims to explore the benefits and potential uses of Augmented Reality technology for supporting communication in presentations. This article presents the architecture and implementation of an Augmented Presentation Feedback System. The system allows a speaker equipped with an Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Display to display visual cues depicted over the listeners’ heads. These can be used as a way to provide the speaker with continuous, private, and immediate feedback on his or her explanations. The results of a case study conducted showed that the system not only assists the speaker in adapting the content and pace of the explanation to the listener but also helps to better manage their interventions and improve the flow of the presentation.

This work aims to explore the benefits and potential uses of Augmented Reality technology for supporting communication in lectures and presentations. In this paper we present the architecture and implementation of an Augmented Presentation Feedback System (APFs). The system allows a speaker equipped with an Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Display to visualize visual cues depicted over the listeners' heads. These can be used as a way of providing the speaker with continuous, private and immediate feedback on her explanations, so she can adapt the content and pace of the explanation to the specific needs of the listener and improve the flow of the presentation.

This paper describes a new co-design technique for early stages of the design process called Embodied Narratives. The technique leverages children's natural playfulness to inspire and motivate the design process, and it uses technology as a part of the process to encourage exploration and improvisation in familiar settings. Its outcome is not the final design but valuable material for further co-design activities. The paper expands the set of available techniques that can be used for co-designing with children, and contributes to growing research on the use of performances in design through empirical studies conducted with 36 children from age 10 to 11.

Electrical grid planning aims at optimizing the grid through the control of the performance and placement of electrical assets in order to minimize failures or vulnerabilities. With this purpose, grid planners carry out an initial stage of data exploration using a large volume of incident and equipment data collected over extensive time periods. In current practice these tasks are performed manually, which makes it very difficult to recognize patterns and gain insights into the data. In this paper, we propose a parallel multivariate visualization technique as a suitable approach for improving the existing practice. Based on the usage of an interactive visualization tool called BarExam, we demonstrate the feasibility of this visualization technique for displaying the dataset and present example insights that this visualization technique can provide to grid planners.

We present a reference model for the representation and visualization of folksonomies as graphs. We discuss the formal representation of folksonomies and derive a hypergraph structure that is core to any visualization approach. We split this hypergraph into subgraphs that can guide the development of folksonomy visualizations. We use these subgraphs to classify existing graph visualizations of folksonomies from the literature and web. We found that most works display the interrelated set of tags, while the relations between resources and/or users are largely neglected by current visualization approaches. Based on these and further findings, we discuss research challenges and potentials for future graph visualizations of folksonomies.

During and after crisis situations people are interested in getting knowledge about what happened and in obtaining information regarding damages, victims, and possible repercussions. Social network systems represent powerful sources due to their rapid growth in the last few years and the amount of continuous updated information published by people. Studies confirmed that people are interested in reporting facts during hazards, however due to the wide distribution of information and the lack of mechanisms to re-use it, it is an awkward task to be accomplished. For the above reasons in this paper we present SocialStory, a social platform for helping people to retrieve and filter materials available on the Internet and to compose and share personal experiences about crisis situations.

Third generation devices, such as smartphones, have the possibility of knowing the position of the user. By combining time, position and data in the Cloud it is possible to make smart deductions as to what information the user needs. These deductions can be performed by an automated assistant that have access to the user's e-mail and SMS messages, calendar, phone book, notes, etc., as well as to the position of the user. The assistant can present the information in an "I feel lucky" display on the user's smartphone. These concepts have been evaluated in a case study with a group of students, simulating the output of such an interface.

In non-formal settings, intrinsic motivation becomes a major issue to keep in mind when designing an educational game. To understand how to make motivating, entertaining and playful educational games, the Embodied Narratives technique has been used to co-design social games with children. This paper discusses the motivation of using this technique as well as some of the findings drawn from its application.

The application of computer games for learning is a field of growing interest in the education community. Games have proved to be a useful resource to teach concepts, expand perceptions, or develop skills. Typically, young children make use of recognition pattern games. This kind of games helps children to improve their knowledge and recognition skills. However, these games require someone to control the process of the game and provide feedback to the child. This paper presents a game environment based on applying the principles of natural interfaces to the development of education computer games. After realizing the proof-of-concept, we could observe that this environment allows children to interact with the games in an instinctive way seamlessly.

The complexity and sophistication of computer games is growing every day, not only in terms of graphical resources and advanced interaction mechanisms but also with regards to their narratives and their rules. In this paper we propose to tackle the complexity related to the rules and narratives of a game design by describing it through combinations of more simple game designs. This approach not only facilitates the description of game designs that are easy to manage and understand but also enables the reuse of game design components, and also allows the designer to respond to established trends in computer games such as the use of "missions" and "mini-games". The proposed approach has been applied to the design and implementation of an educational game (EG) called "Safety Village" of the minigame genre, which aims to help raise children's awareness of emergencies and domestic risks.

One of the most widely used methods for teaching is the lecture. During the last few decades lecturers and students have taken advantage of the progressive introduction of new technology for supporting these lectures. As this trend is very likely to continue, in this paper we will try to foresee some possible technology enriched future lecture scenarios.

In order to enjoy the benefits that the use of computer games may provide for supporting the area of informal education, it is necessary to rely on design models, methods and tools to help reduce the high costs traditionally associated with the development of these kinds of systems. In this paper we present a model which seeks to facilitate the reuse and adaptation of designs of these types of games. The model has supported the implementation of two different games for training children on emergency situations.

introduction Share on Introduction: Social media and collaborative systems for crisis management Authors: Starr Roxanne Hiltz New Jersey Institute of Technology New Jersey Institute of TechnologyView Profile , Paloma Diaz Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Universidad Carlos III de MadridView Profile , Gloria Mark University of California, Irvine University of California, IrvineView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 18Issue 4Article No.: 18pp 1–6https://doi.org/10.1145/2063231.2063232Published:30 December 2011Publication History 49citation3,089DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations49Total Downloads3,089Last 12 Months86Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Touchless interaction techniques do not require physical contact while interacting with a system so to allow natural interaction with digital information, made tangible in the physical world through pervasive screen displays. In this project we explore the use of Nintendo Wii Remote controller as a touchless interface for interacting with map based applications in large displays environments. A prototype (Don't Touch Me) was developed that allows users to collaborative place multimodal annotations on a map: pictorials, auditives and haptics.

Design patterns document successful solutions to recurrent problems in a specific software development domain. However, finding the patterns you need can be difficult, often requiring the designer to comprehend a long narrative description to understand the benefits, implications and trade-offs of each pattern and of its relationships with others. In this paper we propose a visual notation supported by a software tool that may help to identify patterns that could satisfy a designer’s goals, as well as conveying the positive and negative relations among patterns, including dependencies and collisions among patterns selected for a specific problem. This work extends the concept of Softgoal Interdependency Graphs (SIG) enhancing them with a number of visual clues and interaction capabilities to help designers realize the contributions and trade-offs of their design ideas and the complexity of the solution space they are building up.

This paper presents the concept of Interactive Relationship Discovery (IRD) and illustrates its application potentials in technology enhanced learning. Datasets of the Semantic Web are exploited to support learners in understanding how things are related. The approach is based on a user-oriented process model that has been implemented in an easy-to-use tool. A particular emphasis is on the interactive and subjective aspects of relationship discovery. Evaluation results support the applicability and potential of the approach in learning contexts. Benefits and limitations compared to related work are summarized in a final discussion.

The aim of this work is to support educators in the design process of computer game based learning experiences for teaching children about the risks of emergency. As an educational experience can be tailored to different student needs, the risk characteristics of emergency at hand, and the educational purpose of the experience, the proposed model includes the necessary elements to provide all this information. In this way the teacher can specify the requirements of the educational experience, and based on this information to propose possible configurations of the elements of the game.

Pattern languages might be useful tools for design as far as designers can identify the right patterns. For this users need to understand the relationships between patterns and how to combine them. In this process, knowing how patterns have been used by other designers might help in identifying the best combination of solutions. In this paper we propose a module that recommends patterns based on the selection already made by them, with a view to supporting designers in making the correct design decisions.

The communication and the collaboration in a multi-disciplinary team can be diminished due to the different specification tools and languages used by the diverse members of the team. The MODUWEB approach tackles this problem allowing the integration of different design perspectives through model-driven development (MDD) techniques. Such integration is completely transparent to the users of the modeling languages, that is, the designers of the Web-based educational systems, and in this way their productivity is not affected. This paper describes a prototype of a system which implements the MODUWEB approach to combine two domain specific languages dealing with different perspectives of the design of a Web-based educational system: IMS learning design for educational design and Labyrinth for Web design.

In this paper, we discuss the use of visual representations of web design patterns to help end-users and casual developers to identify the patterns they can apply in a specific project. The main goal is to promote design knowledge reuse by facilitating the identification of the right patterns, taking into account that these users have little or no knowledge about web design, and certainly not about design patterns, and that each pattern might include some trade-offs users should consider to make more rational decisions.

The development of a learning system based on integrating a number of learning services needs both a technological platform to support the system as well as a methodology that manages the development process. Such technological platform is provided by the Service Oriented Learning Architecture (SOLA) that defines an architecture style guiding several aspects of deploying units of learning that are packaged as services. The purpose of this paper is to review the SOLA concept and present a specific methodology, based on analysing instructional domains, to complement the SOLA approach. The method here proposed addresses the identification and classification of learning services to facilitate the integration of such services.

The didactic material reusability, understood as its capability to be used in different learning situations or in diverse knowledge domains, is one of its most desirable features. It depends, among other factors, on the use of semantic annotations to describe relevant material characteristics, which can improve its localization and retrieval. In spite of the recognized value of semantic annotations, they are usually considered as optional. In this paper we describe the mechanism proposed in the MD2 approach to automatically generate semantic annotations within the didactic material development. Such mechanism tries to relieve users (developers) from the complexity of material’s annotation and intends to obtain materials with some reasonable degree of reusability.

Evaluation is one of the most important activities in the didactic materials creation since it allows developers to check if the features of created material satisfy all the requirements established at begin of its development and if that material can be an effective support to achieve the educational goals of a particular instructional situation. Its results provide relevant information for the material redesign in such cases when those requirements or educational goals are not satisfied. In this paper we describe an approach to evaluate IMS LD-based materials during their development and deployment in an educational process.

This work aims to provide the instructors of learning process specified by means of an educational language (EML) with a mechanism to modify the process definition during runtime. The paper presents the results of some experiments carried out as part of the evaluation of the envisaged solution. The core ofthe proposed solution is a model which allows the instructor to describe variations of the original learning process design, as well as to evaluate and monitor the process progress. The model is complemented with a method which organizes the performance of the instructor actions supported by the model, and a mechanism to allow its application on running instances of the process. To state the suitability of the proposed method and the expressivity of the adaptation model, the solution has been applied on three different scenarios. Three real learning processes supported on Moodle platforms have been replicated on Unit of Learning (UoL) versions described by means of IMS Learning Design(IMS LD). The adaptations and monitorizations performed by the instructors in the Moodle versions have been described using the adaptation model elements and applied to UoLs following the proposed method guidelines.

Specifying the access policy of a Web system is a relevant design concern that is often dismissed or postponed until the implementation. ADM-RBAC (Ariadne development method with role-based access control) is a model-driven approach for Web systems that supports the specification of access control policies in an integrated way and at two abstraction levels. At the conceptual level a number of visual models specify the access policy in a way that is similar to the userspsila point of view. At the detailed level, models are oriented towards providing enough details to generate prototypes in an automatic or semiautomatic way. In this paper we describe the visual models of ADM-RBAC and their empirical evaluation.

Instructional software can be defined as any computer program used for instruction. As a means to optimise the development process of instructional software, different authors have defined a range of methods based on Software Engineering. However, the use of a method does not guarantee the validity and quality of the product developed; hence, a series of Software Process Improvement (SPI) approaches aimed to improve and guarantee the development process that have arisen. The purpose of this paper is to review the aforementioned approaches and to apply them to the analysis phase of the instructional software development process. The analysis phase aims to define the conditions and needs of the project in order to solve uncertainties in early stages of the process.

Evaluation is one of the most important activities in the didactic materials development since it allows developers to check if the properties of obtained material satisfy all the requirements established at begin of its development and if that material can be an effective support to achieve the educational goals of any instructional situation. Its results are crucial data for the material redesign in such cases when those requirements or educational goals are not satisfied. Here we describe our vision of evaluation in the MD2 development approach that proposes to assess the didactic materials based on their pedagogical utility and usability.

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is an appropriate paradigm for web development since interoperability and flexibility are required to cope with implementation technologies and functionalities that are in permanent evolution. In this paper, we describe and illustrate the MDD process of the ADM (Ariadne Development Method) hypermedia/web engineering method. The two cornerstones of the ADM are the Labyrinth++ meta-meta-model, which formalizes the core constructs used within all the design meta-models, and the meta-meta-model specification as an ontology that provides semantics and reasoning not only for model transformations but also for consistency checking and model validation. These features have been essential in the development of a CASE tool, called AriadneTool that supports the different abstract levels of modeling, model transformations as well as the generation of light prototypes in different web implementation technologies.

The contemporary education has begun to observe constructivist position as important in understanding diversity in education. Instructional design on technology (IDT) presents important challenges to integrate principles, models and techniques inspired by this new perspective emerging in educational technology. The complex learning process (CLP) is a vision that can be suitable to facilitate this aim. In order to face these challenges, it is essential to integrate new technology-supported learning. Our vision is focused on the development of learning process composition and execution languages (LPCEL), which can facilitate the design, composition and execution of CLP. This work presents an overview of LPCEL specification, so that it can be a reference for the development of related technologies

It is not always possible to foresee all properties values of a learning design process at design-time. Sometimes, it is not until its proper execution when those values can be established. Besides, some of the original definitions must be modified to adapt the learning process to its current execution context. This is especially necessary with properties related to the synchronization and temporization of the different activities that constitute the learning process. Due to the above, to successfully implement a learning process, the designers need to use a language expressive enough to allow a detailed description of the runtime behavior of the course and a mechanism to modify its definition during run-time.

In the last years several learning systems have been developed trying, on a different extent, to develop a solution to the problem of personalization of the learning process. Their objective is to provide the learner with a learning system able to adapt the course to her specific characteristics, knowledge, objectives and learning goals. Further more, we would like a learning system that could be sensitive to the context in which the learning session is taking place and capable to adjust the appropriate parameters accordingly. Taking this into account, the authors have selected a group of desirable characteristics for an ideal learning system and have reviewed some of the solutions developed in the last years trying to find out which of those ideal characteristics have already been implemented and which others have not.

In this paper we present a formal approach, based on meta-modelling and graph transformation, to the generation of environments for visual languages (VLs) supporting multiple views. The VL syntax is defined by means of a meta-model. Views for the VL are created by selecting the classes, associations, attributes and constraints that are part of them. Once the environment is generated, the view models are translated into a global, unique model where consistency checking and further analysis can be performed by means of graph grammars. These ideas have been newly implemented in the AToM/sup 3/ tool.

Educational models are subject to a constant evolution and permanent technological developments, with new visions and learning models emerging to face them. These usually include diverse didactic strategies into the learning process. Learning management systems currently evolve towards distributed learning object systems with decentralized execution and integration with heterogeneous applications. The notion of a centralized repository of learning objects should change onto distributed communities of learning objects producers and consumers. In this paper, we present a learning Web services framework to support the integration of newer, complex learning processes and the dynamic generation of content-based communities of interest.

Educational systems have to be assessed to determine whether their user interface, didactic method, instructional materials and interaction mechanisms help users reach their learning and teaching goals. With this purpose, educational developers need to rely on a set of clear, concrete and measurable quality criteria. In this paper, the authors propose an evaluation framework made up of a number of criteria to test the utility and usability of educational hypermedia systems. They also discuss that measuring these criteria entails different forms of imprecision and uncertainty, that call for the user of representation formalisms like fuzzy set theory. The framework presented here is aimed not only at helping educational developers to evaluate their systems, but also to provide them with some guidance to address educational requirements during the design process.

Existing approaches to ontological support in courseware are focused on the annotation of hypermedia nodes or contents, while links are described only by classifying them into a set of predefined types. In this work, we describe the concept of Learning-Link as an independent and reusable learning resource that can be annotated with terms defined in a link ontology. The computational semantics of that ontology, combined with fuzziness to specify graded relations, enables the implementation of extended adaptive behaviors that entail inferences and approximate reasoning.

Despite the existence of software engineering methods for hypermedia development, this process is not as systematic as it could be expected and, in fact, the "hypermedia software crisis" still remains. This situation can be attributed to the scarce dissemination of methods for hypermedia. In this context, we present our experience teaching a software engineering method for hypermedia, called Ariadne, which is used to develop hypermedia applications following a user-centered approach.

Hypermedia applications can be defined as collections of interactive and multimedia documents that are organized as a hypertext net. The development of hypermedia applications poses specific problems, such as the need for modeling sophisticated navigational structures, interactive behaviors, and harmonic presentations involving the synchronization of contents. Moreover, the increasing popularity of Internet based systems has put stress on the lack of mechanisms to formally specify security policies when designing hypermedia applications. Traditional design models and methodologies are not suitable for hypermedia applications and the up-to-now developed hypermedia oriented models do not cover the whole set of design needs. In this context, we present Labyrinth, a hypermedia oriented model providing formal elements to describe the static structure and dynamic behavior of this kind of nonlinear, multisensory, and interactive applications.

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.