Giuseppe Desolda

Interaction with Large Displays: A Survey

Large interactive displays are increasingly placed in public (or semipublic) locations, including museums, shops, various city settings, and offices. This article discusses the evolution of such displays by looking at their use and analyzing how they are changing the concept of human-computer interaction through new modalities. By surveying the literature on systems using these displays, relevant features were identified and used as classification dimensions. The analysis provided may inform the design and development of future installations. A discussion on research challenges concludes the article.

Creation and use of service-based Distributed Interactive Workspaces

Distributed Interactive Workspaces (DIWs) are interactive environments, accessible through different devices, where end users create new content by exploring and aggregating data retrieved from distributed resources in the Web, tailor this content to their own personal needs, use it on different devices, and possibly share and co-create it with others. The need for collaborating with other people by means of DIWs is an important requirement that emerged in field studies conducted in different domains. This paper shows the extension of a platform for mashup composition to support collaboration through DIWs. In particular, it considers the possibility of producing annotated versions of DIWs, to add specific information and make it available to others without corrupting the original resources. It also investigates techniques for synchronous collaboration that enable a distributed creation and execution of the interactive workspaces on different devices and by different users. EUD perspective on the composition of Distributed Interactive Workspaces (DIWs).Synchronous and asynchronous collaborative interventions on a DIW.Platform for the collaborative creation and use of DIWs.

EFESTO: A Platform for the End-User Development of Interactive Workspaces for Data Exploration

This paper illustrates EFESTO, a mashup platform designed to enable end users to explore information by creating interactive workspaces. Within a Web composition environment, end users dynamically create “live mashups” where relevant information, extracted from heterogeneous data sources - including the Linked Open Data – is integrated according to visually defined queries. Visualizations of the resulting data sets can be flexibly shaped-up at runtime. Functions, exposed by local or remote services, also allow users to manipulate the resulting data depending on their situational needs. With respect to other mashup platforms, EFESTO privileges visual composition paradigms that accommodate the end-user mental model for a lightweight data integration within Web workspaces.

Empowering End Users to Customize their Smart Environments: Model, Composition Paradigms, and Domain-Specific Tools

Research on the Internet of Things (IoT) has devoted many efforts to technological aspects. Little social and practical benefits have emerged so far. IoT devices, so-called smart objects, are becoming even more pervasive and social, leading to the need to provide non-technical users with innovative interaction strategies for controlling their behavior. In other words, the opportunities offered by IoT can be amplified if new approaches are conceived to enable non-technical users to be directly involved in “composing” their smart objects by synchronizing their behavior. To fulfill this goal, this article introduces a model that includes new operators for defining rules combining multiple events and conditions exposed by smart objects, and for defining temporal and spatial constraints on rule activation. The article also presents the results of an elicitation study that was conducted to identify possible visual paradigms for expressing composition rules. Prototypes implementing the resulting visual paradigms were compared during a controlled experiment and the one that resulted most relevant for our goals was used in a study that involved home-automation experts. Finally, the article discusses some design implications that came out from the performed studies and presents the architecture of a platform supporting rule definition and execution.

Visual composition of data sources by end users

There is a huge and ever increasing amount of data sources available on the Web, which provide content through programmatic interfaces. Unfortunately, such data sources are accessible only through programming and therefore it is difficult for non-technical users to take advantage of such enormous data assets. The need therefore arises for paradigms to let laypeople, i.e., users without expertise in programming, explore and compose data sources. This paper discusses mechanisms for data source exploration and integration, which emerged from a study where laypeople were involved in discussions to gather their requirements about accessing and composing services. The paper also describes the prototypes that we defined to respond to the requirements highlighted by end users.

Enabling End Users to Create, Annotate and Share Personal Information Spaces

The revolutionary advances of Information and Communication Technology push towards the evolution of end users from passive information consumers to information producers. In many contexts, end users are increasingly willing to manipulate content they get from various resources in the Web, move it across the boundaries of their original applications, and integrate it in Personal Information Spaces (PISs), where they can tailor it to their personal needs, use it, and possibly share it with other people. This paper extends our previous work on the definition of paradigms and tools for lightweight construction of PISs, and shows how to address the need for communicating and sharing information with other stakeholders, which emerged during a field study performed in November 2012 with the previous version of our platform.

Enhancing Workspace Composition by Exploiting Linked Open Data as a Polymorphic Data Source

In the last decade, the World Wide Web has been evolving as a data infrastructure, where a wide variety of resources is increasingly being made available as Web services. This trend is pushing the researchers to investigate approaches like composition platforms, aimed at empowering end users to access, compose and use these services. Despite the wide availability of data sources, due to the specific and diverse end users’ information needs often no data source can satisfy these needs. This limits the adoption of composition platforms in real contexts and everyday use. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper presents a polymorphic data source that exploits the wide availability of information structured in the Linked Open Data cloud. To build this data source, a semi-automatic annotation algorithm is presented that creates semantic annotations for services available in a composition platform. An implementation of this approach in a mashup platform is described.

Making Mashups Actionable Through Elastic Design Principles

This paper discusses motivations and requirements leading to elastic environments where relevant information and the functions that can be performed on it can be shaped by end users at runtime. As a solution for creating elastic environments, a framework is presented which exploits methods for the mashup of heterogeneous resources and elastic features that permit the easy transition of information between different task contexts according to the recently proposed notion of transformative user experience.

From smart objects to smart experiences: An end-user development approach

Abstract The growing availability of smart objects is stimulating researchers to investigate the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon from different perspectives. The potential of this technology is evident in different domains. In Cultural Heritage (CH), it may enhance access to CH collections, in order to ensure a more engaging visit experience and to increase the appropriation of CH content by visitors. So far, research on IoT has primarily focused on technical features of smart objects (e.g., how to program sensors and actuators), while there are very few approaches trying to facilitate the adoption of such a technology by end users. This lack limits the social and practical benefits of IoT; it creates barriers in all those usage scenarios where people would like to define the behavior of smart objects but they might not have the required programming skills. This is becoming evident in CH sites, where different stakeholders would benefit from managing ecosystems of interoperable smart objects to create enhanced visit experiences. This article presents a visual composition paradigm that allows non-programmers to synchronize the behavior of smart objects, thus determining more engaging user experiences. It discusses how the paradigm suites the need of curators and guides of CH sites to define smart visit experiences through which visitors can acquire CH content by interacting with the surrounding environment and the smart objects included in it. A serious game designed with professional guides of CH sites is used as a case study to show the potential of the presented approach.

Hands-on Actionable Mashups

This paper describes how to involve end users without expertise in programming in a session where they will be asked to accomplish some tasks according to a new paradigm for actionable mashups. The goal will be to understand what the advantages of this new paradigm are with respect to traditional methods for mashup composition and information exploration.