Cristiano Maciel

Social Network Users’ Religiosity and the Design of Post Mortem Aspects

Social networks increase the challenges of designing real-world aspects whose computational abstraction is not simple. This includes death and digital legacy, strongly influenced by cultural phenomena, such as religion. Therefore, it is important to analyze youngsters’ concepts of death in the web, as the Internet Generation outnumbers other groups of social network users. Besides, due to their age, many of them face other people’s death for the first time on the web. This paper analyzes to what extent these users’ religion and the belief in afterlife may signal guidelines for a social network project that considers volition towards digital legacy. The data herein analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively come from a survey-based research with Brazilian high school students. The contributions for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies comprise design solutions that may consider aspects of religion, death and digital legacy, also improving users’ and designers’ understanding on these issues in system design.

Designing a platform to facilitate the development of virtual e-participation environments

Proposals regarding citizen participation in advisory and/or deliberative processes are still scarce in the e-democracy field, according to UNPAN report [8]. Exploiting social network groups with shared or common interests, can be an efficient way to promote participation. This work brings together guidelines based on software reuse techniques and social network concepts in a project to design a platform to facilitate the development of virtual environments with social networks characteristics for e-participation. This platform is based on a participation model called Government-Citizen Interactive Model.

A multi-agent architecture to support ubiquitous applications in smart environments

The implementation of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) requires the support of tools and technologies capable of interpreting large quantities of data collected from different sources comprising sensors networks, mobile devices, social networks and other systems. The agent-oriented paradigm is particularly appropriate for such a scenario, because agents offer some important features, like proactive and reactive reasoning, autonomy, social abilities and learning. In this work we propose a middleware architecture to support the development of applications in the scope of Smart Cities, describing its main characteristics and requirements. The Devices, Environments and Social networks Integration Architecture (DESIA) proposal includes emerging technologies such as social networks, cloud computing and digital ecosystems, emphasizing security and privacy, key aspects not always covered by other architectures.

Visualizing Aedes aegypti infestation in urban areas: A case study on open government data mashups

Publishing open government data and displaying the related information is a task that requires systematization and the use of various technologies. Due to technical limitations (dependence on technological platforms, for example), this is not a standard practice among government system developers. In this work, we present a case study that involves the creat ion of a map to visualiz e information about the infestation of Aedes aegypti (dengue vector) in the municipality of Cuiaba , based on the selection and analysis of open data . This case study not only demo nstrates that offering an easy way for presenting information on public health brings benefits to the community, but it also discusses a solution that serves as a strategy for government agencies to make use of resources related to open data.

A customized mobile application for a cerebral palsy user

Mobile web has created several opportunities for the development of assistive technologies that can support disabled people in the performance of daily life activities. Mobile applications can be developed using participatory design methods which result in customized assistive solutions. In this paper, we describe the development of a mobile application to support M, a man with cerebral palsy in his communication and professional activities, highlighting the use of a participatory design method. We discuss the changes that mobile web can bring to disabled peoples lives, in the light of this experience. We conclude that mobile web applications can be configured as interesting solutions for assistive technologies.

Towards an ontology to support the deployment of eParticipation environments

A strong democracy is created if citizens are able to interact among themselves and with the government by giving their opinions. In this context, eParticipation comes with ICTs to consolidate these interactions. However, there are problems in selecting such tools. One tool does not comprise all stages in an eParticipation process and using a set of tools allows us to cover them, but there are problems in selecting the appropriate tools. To do so, the initial step is to understand the domain in order to make this choice, and if we are able to use this knowledge in this context, we can provide more appropriate ICTs for an eParticipation process. This paper discusses the understanding of the eParticipation area, aggregating it in an ontology for the eParticipation domain, called ePDO. We describe the steps used to build this ontology and how this knowledge can be used to improve the deployment of eParticipation environments.

Virtual Homage to the Dead: An Analysis of Digital Memorials in the Social Web

Considering that many real-world cultural practices are now migrating to virtual environments, the expression of mourning and bereavement is also being imported to the virtual world, by means of the so-called digital memorials, supported by increasingly new and complex technologies. In this paper, we undertake a literature review on real and digital memorials, as well as social networks. Then, through empirical observation of digital memorials in Brazil, we investigate if they have characteristics of the social web. Next, by means of an interaction test and a questionnaire, we analyze how users feel when interacting with digital memorials and their evaluation on the functionalities of those applications. Finally, we approach the difficulties found when studying this kind of tools and our perspectives for future works.

Increasing Information Auditability for Social Network Users

This paper sets out the challenge of how to provide information auditability to citizens regarding social networks. The aim is to discuss the issues concerning information published on social networks and specifically to describe how to verify the veracity of this information. It is based on the idea that it urgent improvement of interface requirements is necessary for this kind of software to provide users with ways to account for, validate, verify and control information. The paper reports the construction of a catalog of characteristics for information auditability in social networks. An exploratory study suggests mechanisms that can be used to implement these characteristics into this kind of software interface. The conclusion presents remarks on challenges and future studies.

Transparency in practice: using visualization to enhance the interpretability of open data

Urban data is gradually being opened to the public. Tools for exploitation, analysis and discovery of new knowledge in large data sets are the key to enable citizens to make sense of such large amount of data. The purpose of this work is to analyze how data analysis associated with visualization techniques in different levels can lead to the improvement of the interpretability of open data. With the support of machine learning techniques, these visualizations may improve pattern identification in urban data sets. To guide our discussion, a case study was conducted analyzing socioeconomic data released by the Chicago city government. We discussed the use of different visualizations in this scenario, tailored for univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis. We also performed an evaluation of the different forms of visualization proposed in this work. We could observe that allowing the user to explore open urban data using some specific visualizations may lead to more effective data interpretation.

Visualizing aedes aegypti infestation in urban areas: a case study on open government data mashups

Publishing open government data and displaying the related information is a task that requires systematization and the use of various technologies. Due to technical limitations (dependence on technological platforms, for example), this is not a standard practice among government system developers. In this work, we present a case study that involves the creation of a map to visualize information about the infestation of Aedes aegypti (dengue vector) in the municipality of Cuiabá, based on the selection and analysis of open data. This case study not only demonstrates that offering an easy way for presenting information on public health brings benefits to the community, but it also discusses a solution that serves as a strategy for government agencies to make use of resources related to open data.