Monica Perrero

UbiquiTO: a Multi-Device Adaptive Guide

This paper describes UbiquiTO, an adaptive tourist guide, conceived as a “journey companion” for mobile users in Turin, aimed, for the current prototype, at supporting mobile workers helping them to organize their late afternoon and evening in town. The paper is intended to emphasize the most relevant feature of the system, that is the integration of different adaptation strategies in order to allow high flexibility in terms of device used, localization technology, user preferences and context conditions.

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.

Supporting content discovery and organization in networks of contents and users

The design of approaches for supporting the user in the navigation of a variety of contents is an interesting area of research with many potential applications. In particular, interactive television (iTV) offers users the opportunity of accessing a huge amount of contents, ranging from general to specialized ones. As a consequence, the exploration of such contents must be supported in some way. In this paper, we present an innovative approach that integrates some recent methodologies and technologies developed in different areas of Artificial Intelligence and the Web: user-model-based adaptation, social networking, semantic annotation, and content sharing. We show how the integration of these technologies can provide interesting opportunities for a new approach to content navigation and discovery based on the possibility of exploring personalized networks of contents, users and concepts. Also, we focus on the specific goal of designing a platform for accessing iTV contents with the aim of providing the user with many alternative ways of exploring and discovering potentially interesting videos. After discussing the application, integrated in a project by Telecom Italia for a new paradigm of iTV, we preset the architecture we designed for integrating the methodologies discussed above.

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.

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.

iDYNamicTV: a social adaptive television experience

The paper presents an approach to merge Web 2.0 and adaptation with TV contents in order to enrich the user experience. We present iDYNamicTV, a social Web-based recommender system dealing with multimedia contents. iDYNamicTV is part of a larger project by Telecom Italia (DynamicTV) for enhancing user experience in TV fruition. The goal of iDynamicTV is to provide facilities to entertain when exploring and discovering media contents on the Web using a computer interface.

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.