Marina Geymonat

Interacting with social networks of intelligent things and people in the world of gastronomy

This article introduces a framework for creating rich augmented environments based on a social web of intelligent things and people. We target outdoor environments, aiming to transform a region into a smart environment that can share its cultural heritage with people, promoting itself and its special qualities. Using the applications developed in the framework, people can interact with things, listen to the stories that these things tell them, and make their own contributions. The things are intelligent in the sense that they aggregate information provided by users and behave in a socially active way. They can autonomously establish social relationships on the basis of their properties and their interaction with users. Hence when a user gets in touch with a thing, she is also introduced to its social network consisting of other things and of users; she can navigate this network to discover and explore the world around the thing itself. Thus the system supports serendipitous navigation in a network of things and people that evolves according to the behavior of users. An innovative interaction model was defined that allows users to interact with objects in a natural, playful way using smartphones without the need for a specially created infrastructure. The framework was instantiated into a suite of applications called WantEat, in which objects from the domain of tourism and gastronomy (such as cheese wheels or bottles of wine) are taken as testimonials of the cultural roots of a region. WantEat includes an application that allows the definition and registration of things, a mobile application that allows users to interact with things, and an application that supports stakeholders in getting feedback about the things that they have registered in the system. WantEat was developed and tested in a real-world context which involved a region and gastronomy-related items from it (such as products, shops, restaurants, and recipes), through an early evaluation with stakeholders and a final evaluation with hundreds of users.

DynamicTV: a culture-aware recommender

A geographically homogeneous group of citizens shares much common knowledge, characteristics of their culture and history. This knowledge is captured for the use in an item-based recommender system that uses textual information, by introducing bias corpora: newspaper articles that represent the shared knowledge. We present a technique for incorporating and quickly replacing bias corpora in a case study of recommendation of TV contents on our IPTV platform. With this recommender, users watched more items and expressed satisfaction with the service.

Where Have You Ended Up Today? Dynamic TV and the Inter-tainment Paradigm

Traditional TV was based on a time-dependent and passive paradigm of use: the availability of audiovisual contents was pre-defined by a rigid scheduling, and users role was to choose among limited alternatives. A potential for active TV experience is now available: users should be allowed to access contents that fit their attitudes at any time, while being encouraged to discover new domains of interest. This paper outlines the basic elements of the new Inter-tainment paradigm, which builds on an active role of the user and on attitude-centred fruition. Successful applications of the new paradigm require flexible and reconfigurable structures of navigation: the development stages of an Inter-tainment system are reported here.

The Falsified Self: Complexities in Personal Data Collection

Personal Informatics systems collect personal information in order to trigger self-reflection and improve self-knowledge. Users can now choose among different wearable devices for collecting these data according to their needs and desires. These tools exploit not only different shapes and physical forms, but also diverse technologies and algorithms, which may impact the effectiveness of data gathering. In this paper we explored whether there are significant differences in their reported measures and how these can impact the user experience, along with the perceived accuracy of the gathered data and the perceived reliability of the device. To this aim, we carried out an autoethnography which lasted 4 weeks, monitoring the number of steps and the distance covered during the day and the sleep period through different wearables. The results showed that there are wide differences among diverse tools and these differences greatly influence how data collected and devices used are perceived.

Specch.io: A Personal QS Mirror for Life Patterns Discovery and "Self" Reshaping

This paper describes the process that led to the design of the Specch.io framework. Specch.io is a platform for seamless data collection, mash-up, visualization and exploration of personal data. The project is part of an internal research track focused on the usage of technology to promote and foster individual well-being from a biopsychosocial (BPS) perspective. The objective of Specch.io, is to reveal and raise awareness on individual life patterns, generating integration and meaning about aspects of the “self” that can hardly be captured from a subjective point of view.

A visual analytics system for mobile telecommunication marketing analysis

The Mobile Operators European market is likely one of the most competitive arenas, and even big telecommunication companies are continuously tuning their marketing strategies to contrast the aggressive campaigns of old and new competitors. This paper presents a visual analytics solution developed for supporting one of the decision making processes of TIM (Telecom Italia Group), the biggest Italian provider of telecommunications services with over 30M active mobile subscribers (at September 2014). The proposed system uses information coming from both public open data and internal TIM data, mapping them on the Italian hierarchy of 20 regions and 110 provinces. The system has been designed together with TIM analysts and allows for selecting an optimal set of provinces on which to focus marketing campaigns, according to the campaign goals, the available market, the local economy, the actual traffic, and the actual TIM penetration.

Interacting with a Social Web of Smart Objects for Enhancing Tourist Experiences

In this paper we introduce the idea of interaction with networks of socially intelligent objects as a way of supporting tourists and introducing them to the culture of a territory and as a way of maintaing the cultural heritage of a territory alive. We illustrate this idea with an application we designed in the field of gastronomy. Socially intelligent objects are able to maintain and aggregate knowledge about themselves and their world and are able to establish social relations with other objects and people. In this way they become hubs which allow tourists to get in touch with the world of the objects which is made of a territory, its culture and traditions, people and other objects. We support natural forms of interaction without requiring any electronic infrastructring of the objects. In particular, we designed an interaction paradigm supporting a playful enhancing experience when interacting with objects. We also support a continuum of experience in the real and virtual world.

Data Design for Wellness and Sustainability

The paper describes the design-centered methodology and the design guidelines that guided the research and the development phase within the collaboration between the Architecture and Design Department of the Polytechnic of Turin and the Research Lab of TIM. The research wants to investigate how to expand boundaries of the wearable devices through the work of an interdisciplinary team and following the systemic design approach, a methodology that focuses on relations. Starting from an holistic diagnosis and the analysis of trends, the team define six personas, useful to write down essential guidelines and the two new concept. According to behaviours, habits and requirements, these concepts put human at the center of the whole process and the design gives a particular attention to the sustainability. In this perspective sustainability is defined as the creation of positive relations among people, able to generate and encourage the development of well-being conditions with results on the community as a whole.

E-Inclusion as the next challenge for sustainable consumption

In this paper we highlight how small producers of quality food, depositary of traditions that nowadays are running the risk of being lost, could be included in the benefits provided by digital technologies, through an interactive system that could enhance their old communication habits. Within PIEMONTE Project we adopted a co-design process to include these social actors in the design development. The result is an interactive system that, based on three technological pillars (a visual recognition algorithm, an ontology based knowledge manager, and a social network engine) and a vision of intelligent objects as a mean to promote the access and the interconnection in the world of quality food, tries to keep alive the cultural heritage of a territory.

WantEat: interacting with social networks of smart objects for sharing cultural heritage and supporting sustainability

WantEat is about interacting with everyday objects that become intelligent hubs for accessing and sharing the cultural heritage of a territory. Objects are smart in the sense that they share knowledge with users, interact with them in a personalized way and maintain social relationships with users and other objects. When interacting with an object, a user is also introduced to the social network of its friends; the user can explore this network to discover new interesting information, services, objects, people. The objects we consider belong to the realm of gastronomy, including food items, shops, restaurants, cooks, recipes, etc. On the one hand, this allows people to get deeply in touch with the culture of a territory, making people aware of its traditions and supporting a sustainable gastronomy; on the other hand, the approach supports networking and the promotion of local quality productions and economy.