Lucio Davide Spano

MARIA: A universal, declarative, multiple abstraction-level language for service-oriented applications in ubiquitous environments

One important evolution in software applications is the spread of service-oriented architectures in ubiquitous environments. Such environments are characterized by a wide set of interactive devices, with interactive applications that exploit a number of functionalities developed beforehand and encapsulated in Web services. In this article, we discuss how a novel model-based UIDL can provide useful support both at design and runtime for these types of applications. Web service annotations can also be exploited for providing hints for user interface development at design time. At runtime the language is exploited to support dynamic generation of user interfaces adapted to the different devices at hand during the user interface migration process, which is particularly important in ubiquitous environments.

UbiCicero: A location-aware, multi-device museum guide

In this paper, we propose UbiCicero, a multi-device, location-aware museum guide able to opportunistically exploit large screens when users are nearby. Various types of games are included in addition to the museum and artwork descriptions. The mobile guide is equipped with an RFID reader, which detects nearby tagged artworks. By taking into account context-dependent information, including the current user position and behaviour history, as well as the type of device available, more personalised and relevant information is provided to the user, enabling a richer overall experience. We also present example applications of this solution and then discuss the results of first empirical tests performed to evaluate the usefulness and usability of the enhanced multi-device guide.

Engineering the authoring of usable service front ends

This paper presents a method and the associated authoring tool for supporting the development of interactive applications able to access multiple Web Services, even from different types of interactive devices. We show how model-based descriptions are useful for this purpose and describe the associated automatic support along with the underlying rules. The proposed environment is able to aid in the design of new interactive applications that access pre-existing Web Services, which may contain annotations supporting the user interface development. This is achieved through the use of task models as a starting point for the design and development of the corresponding implementations. We also provide an example to better illustrate the features of the approach, and report on two evaluations conducted to assess the support tool.

Cicero Designer: An Environment for End-User Development of Multi-Device Museum Guides

This paper describes the design and implementation of a tool to allow people without programming experience to customize the functionality and user interface of a multi-device museum guide. It consists of a direct-manipulation visual environment that supports editing of the main features of a museum guide and the creation of the associated interactive games. The tool then generates application versions for access through both mobile and large screen stationary devices. We also report on a first empirical evaluation carried out with museum curators.

Model-Based Design of Multi-device Interactive Applications Based on Web Services

Creating an interactive application based on pre-existing functionalities poses a number of novel issues in the design process. We discuss a method and an associated model-based language, which aim to address such issues in multi-device contexts. One specific aspect of this method is the ability to obtain user interfaces for accessing multiple services. In addition, the possibility to specify interactive objects, Web services accesses and scripts allows designers to describe Rich Internet Applications as well.

GestIT: a declarative and compositional framework for multiplatform gesture definition

Gestural interfaces allow complex manipulative interactions that are hardly manageable using traditional event handlers. Indeed, such kind of interaction has longer duration in time than that carried out in form-based user interfaces, and often it is important to provide users with intermediate feedback during the gesture performance. Therefore, the gesture specification code is a mixture of the recognition logic and the feedback definition. This makes it difficult 1) to write maintainable code and 2) reuse the gesture definition in different applications. To overcome these kinds of limitations, the research community has considered declarative approaches for the specification of gesture temporal evolution. In this paper, we discuss the creation of gestural interfaces using GestIT, a framework that allows declarative and compositional definition of gestures for different recognition platforms (e.g. multitouch and full-body), through a set of examples and the comparison with existing approaches.

A compositional model for gesture definition

The description of a gesture requires temporal analysis of values generated by input sensors and does not fit well the observer pattern traditionally used by frameworks to handle user input. The current solution is to embed particular gesture-based interactions, such as pinch-to-zoom, into frameworks by notifying when a whole gesture is detected. This approach suffers from a lack of flexibility unless the programmer performs explicit temporal analysis of raw sensors data. This paper proposes a compositional, declarative meta-model for gestures definition based on Petri Nets. Basic traits are used as building blocks for defining gestures; each one notifies the change of a feature value. A complex gesture is defined by the composition of other sub-gestures using a set of operators. The user interface behaviour can be associated to the recognition of the whole gesture or to any other sub-component, addressing the problem of granularity for the notification events. The meta-model can be instantiated for different gesture recognition supports and its definition has been validated through a proof of concept library. Sample applications have been developed for supporting multitouch gestures on iOS and full body gestures with Microsoft Kinect.

Creating mashups by direct manipulation of existing web applications

We present an environment to enable people without programming knowledge to create mashups composed of Web components selected directly from existing Web applications. The authoring environment allows the creation of communication among components originally belonging to different applications. We report on some example application, the underlying architecture of the environment, and a first user test.

An environment for End-User Development of Web mashups

End-User Development aims to find novel ways that are suitable and intuitive for end users to create their own applications. We present a graphical environment in which users create new mashups by directly selecting interaction elements, content and functionalities from existing Web applications without requiring the intervention of expert developers. Then, users just need to exploit a copy-paste metaphor to indicate how to compose the selected interactive content and functionalities in the new mashup. The environment is enabled by a Web-based platform accessible from any browser, and is suitable for users without particular programming skills. We describe the architecture of our platform and how it works, including its intelligent support, show example applications, and report the results of first user studies. An environment for creating Web mashups by direct manipulation of Web applications.Composition of novel applications from existing ones through a copy-paste metaphor.Web mashups solution that does not require pre-processing by expert developers.Mashup environment able to support modern dynamic Web applications.

A Location-Aware Guide Based on Active RFIDs in Multi-Device Environments

In this chapter, we propose a multi-device, location-aware museum guide. It is a mobile guide able to opportunistically exploit large screens when they are nearby the user. Various types of games, which can exploit multi-device environments, are included in addition to the museum and artwork descriptions. The mobile guide is equipped with an RFID reader, which provides information useful to automatically detect nearby artworks. We also present example applications of this solution and then briefly discuss the results of first empirical tests performed to evaluate the usefulness and the usability of the enhanced mobile guide.