Ombretta Gaggi

A Serious Game for Predicting the Risk of Developmental Dyslexia in Pre-Readers Children

Dyslexia is one of the main cognitive disabilities affecting the reading acquisition. As it may interfere with educational opportunities even in presence of adequate intelligence, it is of crucial importance to obtain early diagnosis and help affected children as soon as possible. Generally, dyslexia is diagnosed not earlier than primary school as difficulties in reading is used as first indicator. Yet, being able to detect and treat this problem even in preschool years would ensure better chances to limit its impact and help the childs future reading ability. To this aim, we discuss here a series of serious games we designed and tested to train specific skills that have been proven to be effective against dyslexia.

Using gamification to discover cultural heritage locations from geo-tagged photos

Many enchanting cultural heritage locations are hidden from tourists, especially when considering countries full of historic attractions. Tourists tend to consider only mainstream monuments and towns, neglecting wonderful little jewels along their travel itinerary. However, this is generally not their fault, as travelers cannot be aware of all the surrounding beauties when visiting a new region. To this aim, we discuss and analyze here PhotoTrip, an interactive tool able to autonomously recommend charming, even if not mainstream, cultural heritage locations along travel itineraries. PhotoTrip is able to identify these points of interest by gathering pictures and related information from Flickr and Wikipedia and then provide the user with suggestions and recommendations. An important technical challenge for this kind of services is the ability to provide only the most relevant pictures among the many available for any considered itinerary. To this aim, we have exploited social networks, crowdsourcing and gamification to involve users in the process of improving the response quality of our system.

Cross-platform mobile development: a study on apps with animations

The paper presents a comparison between different frameworks for cross-platform mobile development, MoSync, Titanium, jQuery Mobile and Phonegap, with particular attention to development of applications with animations. We define a set of criteria for the evaluation and we develop the same game as case study app, with the aim to provide an unbias judgement. Our analysis recommends Titanium as the best framework to develop mobile applications with animations.

Analysis and verification of SMIL documents

In this paper, we consider the problem of automatic verification of SMIL documents and present a tool which can assist the user in the complex task of authoring a multimedia presentation. The tool is based on a formal semantics defining the temporal aspects of SMIL elements by means of a set of inference rules. The rules, in the spirit of Hoare’s semantics, describe how the execution of a piece of code changes the state of the computation of a player. If any temporal conflict is found, the system returns a message to the user pointing out the element which contains the conflict and its motivation. This helps the user to develop robust and clear code.

PlayWithEyes: A new way to test children eyes

One of the major problems of doctors when dealing with children is to capture and maintain their attention. This is particularly true for oculists that must test children eyes, especially if they are very young. In this paper we present PlayWithEyes, a serious game that aims at testing the children eyes while they are having fun playing with Lea symbols and images taken from popular cartoons, using a touch interface. PlayWithEyes was created to perform screening of visual acuity of very young children, since early diagnosis is very important for some sight defects like amblyopia (lazy eye).

Template-Based Generation of Multimedia Presentations

Data-centered approaches to multimedia presentation design and implementation can be developed by extending methodologies and technologies common in text-based applications. A multimedia report is a multimedia presentation built on a set of data returned by one or more queries to multimedia repositories, integrated according to a template with appropriate spatial layout and temporal synchronization, and coherently delivered to a user for browsing. We discuss the problem of defining templates for such multimedia reports with a focus on media coordination and synchronization. Multimedia presentations can be automatically generated according to the template by instantiating it on actual data instances. An XML language describes the spatial layout and the temporal constraints of the media objects. An authoring system and a player have been implemented.

Schema modelling for automatic generation of multimedia presentations

Multimedia documents are an effective way to present different kinds of information, since the integration of different media types gives more expressive power and opportunities to catch the user attention. A multimedia report is a multimedia presentation built on a set of data returned by one or more queries to multimedia repositories, integrated according to a schema with appropriate spatial layout and temporal synchronization, and coherently delivered to a user for browsing. We discuss the problem of defining schemas for such multimedia reports with a focus on the media coordination and synchronization constraints. Multimedia presentations can then be automatically generated according to the schema. We have defined an XML language to describe the spatial layout and the temporal constraints of the media objects, together with a visual authoring system helping the user to design the presentation template.

A synchronization model for hypermedia documents navigation

This paper presents a model for describing the synchronization between several media delivered over a network in a Web-based environment. Synchronization concerns the download and the activation of coordinated media files according to the structure of the whole hypermedia document, the playback status of the media objects, and the user interaction. The model defines five synchronization primitives some of which can be automatically deducted from the document structure and the media-related events. The model is oriented to describe applications based on a main video or audio narration to which static or dynamic documents are attached. The model is suited for applications like distance education, professional training, Web advertising and selling, and news-on-demand.

Modelling Synchronized Hypermedia Presentations

This paper presents a synchronization model for hypermedia presentations. Several media, continuous, like video and audio files, and non-continuous, like text pages and images, are delivered separately in a distributed environment like the World Wide Web, and presented to the user in a coordinated way.The model is based on a set of synchronization relationships which define media behavior during presentation playback, channels in which to play them, and the effects of user interaction. The model is suited for a wide range of applications, among which self and distance education, professional training, Web advertising, cultural heritage promotion and news-on-demand are good representatives. The model is formally described in terms of changes in the presentation state due to media-related events. A virtual exhibition is analyzed as a test bed to validate the model.

Serious Games for Early Identification of Developmental Dyslexia

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting reading acquisition. DD cannot be diagnosed before starting the primary school; thereby, one of the main challenges is to obtain an early DD identification even during preschool years. Achieving this goal could help children at risk for DD to limit the impact of this disorder. To this aim, we have created a digital system composed of various serious games designed for predicting the risk of DD in preschoolers and potentially training specific skills impaired in this learning disability. Our set of serious games are designed to be accessible from any device, a computer with mouse and keyboard, but also a tablet with touch interface for younger children.