Elena Not

Adaptive, intelligent presentation of information for the museum visitor in PEACH

The study of intelligent user interfaces and user modeling and adaptation is well suited for augmenting educational visits to museums. We have defined a novel integrated framework for museum visits and claim that such a framework is essential in such a vast domain that inherently implies complex interactivity. We found that it requires a significant investment in software and hardware infrastructure, design and implementation of intelligent interfaces, and a systematic and iterative evaluation of the design and functionality of user interfaces, involving actual visitors at every stage. We defined and built a suite of interactive and user-adaptive technologies for museum visitors, which was then evaluated at the Buonconsiglio Castle in Trento, Italy: (1) animated agents that help motivate visitors and focus their attention when necessary, (2) automatically generated, adaptive video documentaries on mobile devices, and (3) automatically generated post-visit summaries that reflect the individual interests of visitors as determined by their behavior and choices during their visit. These components are supported by underlying user modeling and inference mechanisms that allow for adaptivity and personalization. Novel software infrastructure allows for agent connectivity and fusion of multiple positioning data streams in the museum space. We conducted several experiments, focusing on various aspects of PEACH. In one, conducted with 110 visitors, we found evidence that even older users are comfortable interacting with a major component of the system.

User-centred Design of Flexible Hypermedia for a Mobile Guide: Reflections on the HyperAudio Experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop a system based on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile museum guide developed in the late 1990s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in natural science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping define the user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers, and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques. This is a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step in an iterative design process that considers the user interaction to be the central point. This paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulating the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered from the perspective of later developments: our findings still appers to be valid despite the time that had passed.A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop a system based on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile museum guide developed in the late 1990s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in natural science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping define the user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers, and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques. This is a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step in an iterative design process that considers the user interaction to be the central point. This paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulating the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered from the perspective of later developments: our findings still appers to be valid despite the time that had passed.

Integrating material and digital: a new way for cultural heritage

to a greater level of detail than its paper counterpart, but the feeling of being in the archive, the emotion of touching the same paper as the master, and the smell of dust and years past are what makes the experience unique and unforgettable. Emotion, affect, and sensation are essential parts of the experience of heritage, “[y]et museums’ preference for the information over the material, and for learning over [T]he museum’s preoccupation with the information and the way it is juxtaposed to objects ... immediately takes the museum visitor one step beyond the material, physical thing they see displayed before them, away from the emotional and other possibilities that may lie in their sensory interaction with it. —Sandra Dudley [1]

Modelling and Adapting to Context

Abstract: One of the hardest points in context-aware applications is deciding what reactions a system has to a certain context. In this paper, we introduce an architecture used in two context-aware museum guides. We discuss how the context is modelled and we briefly present a rule-based mechanism to trigger system actions. A rule-based system offers the flexibility required to be context-sensitive in the broadest sense since many context features can be considered and evaluated at the same time. This architecture is very flexible and easily supports a fast prototyping approach.

Multimodal support to group dynamics

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

Knocking on elders' door: investigating the functional and emotional geography of their domestic space

The domestic environment is more than a place where to live. It is a territory of meaning, a place where pleasure, affect and aesthetics are deeply interwoven with the functional and utilitarian dimensions. With the aging process, the home is progressively invested with new meanings and functions, and becomes the emotional center of older peoples life. This paper presents a user study based on cultural probes on how domestic spaces are managed and perceived by older adults, uncovering some of the complex interrelations among the daily activities, objects and meanings revolving around the home. The findings provide suggestions on how the dimensions of remembrance, perception of safety and environmental stability may affect the design of domestic technology for elderly people.

HIPS: hyper-interaction within physical space

HIPS is a project recently funded by the European Commission within the I-Cube initiative whose main aim is to study new technologies and interaction modalities that allow people to navigate both a physical space and a related information space at the same time, with a minimal gap between the two. The project envisages a portable electronic tour guide (to exhibitions, museums, archaeological sites, expositions distributed over a city, and to cities themselves) which empowers visitors to determine themselves the structure of a tour, according to their own criteria, interests and needs and which allow different information delivery modalities.

Xface open source project and smil-agent scripting language for creating and animating embodied conversational agents

Xface is a set of open source tools for creation of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) using MPEG4 and keyframe based rendering driven by SMIL-Agent scripting language. Xface Toolkit, coupled with SMIL-Agent scripting serves as a full 3D facial animation authoring package. Xface project is initiated by Cognitive and Communication Technologies (TCC) division of FBK-irst (formerly ITC-irst). The toolkit is written in ANSI C++, and is open source and platform independent.

The MacroNode Approach: Mediating Between Adaptive and Dynamic Hypermedia

In this paper, we discuss an approach that tries to blur the distinction between adaptive hypermedia and dynamic NLG-based hypermedia. The approach aims at finding an optimal trade-off between resource reuse and flexibility: existing atomic pieces of data are collected and properly annotated; at the interaction time, the system dynamically builds the nodes of the hypermedia composing different pieces together. The proposed annotation formalism is illustrated and a rule-based system to compose hypermedia nodes exploiting different knowledge sources is presented. Finally, the advantages of this approach with respect to adaptation and dynamic generation are discussed.

Automatic cinematography and multilingual NLG for generating video documentaries

Automatically constructing a complete documentary or educational film from scattered pieces of images and knowledge is a significant challenge. Even when this information is provided in an annotated format, the problems of ordering, structuring and animating sequences of images, and producing natural language descriptions that correspond to those images within multiple constraints, are each individually difficult tasks. This paper describes an approach for tackling these problems through a combination of rhetorical structures with narrative and film theory to produce movie-like visual animations from still images along with natural language generation techniques needed to produce text descriptions of what is being seen in the animations. The use of rhetorical structures from NLG is used to integrate separate components for video creation and script generation. We further describe an implementation, named Glamour, that produces actual, short video documentaries, focusing on a cultural heritage domain, and that have been evaluated by professional filmmakers.