Paolo Buono

Research directions in data wrangling: visuatizations and transformations for usable and credible data

In spite of advances in technologies for working with data, analysts still spend an inordinate amount of time diagnosing data quality issues and manipulating data into a usable form. This process of ‘data wrangling’ often constitutes the most tedious and time-consuming aspect of analysis. Though data cleaning and integration arelongstanding issues in the database community, relatively little research has explored how interactive visualization can advance the state of the art. In this article, we review the challenges and opportunities associated with addressing data quality issues. We argue that analysts might more effectively wrangle data through new interactive systems that integrate data verification, transformation, and visualization. We identify a number of outstanding research questions, including how appropriate visual encodings can facilitate apprehension of missing data, discrepant values, and uncertainty; how interactive visualizations might facilitate data transform specification; and how recorded provenance and social interaction might enable wider reuse, verification, and modification of data transformations.

Explore! possibilities and challenges of mobile learning

This paper reports the experimental studies we have performed to evaluate Explore!, an m-learning system that supports middle school students during a visit to an archaeological park. It exploits a learning technique called excursion-game, whose aim is to help students to acquire historical notions while playing and to make archaeological visits more effective and exciting. In order to understand the potentials and limitations of Explore!, our studies compare the experience of playing the excursion-game with and without technological support. The design and evaluation of Explore! have provided knowledge on the advantages and pitfalls of m-learning that may be instrumental in informing the current debate on e-learning.

Investigating and promoting UX practice in industry: an experimental study

Abstract The efforts of addressing user experience (UX) in product development keep growing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of workshops and conferences bringing together academics and practitioners, who aim at creating interactive software able to satisfy their users. This special issue focuses on “Interplay between User Experience Evaluation and Software Development”, stating that the gap between human-computer interaction and software engineering with regard to usability has somewhat been narrowed. Unfortunately, our experience shows that software development organizations perform few usability engineering activities or none at all. Several authors acknowledge that, in order to understand the reasons of the limited impact of usability engineering and UX methods, and to try to modify this situation, it is fundamental to thoroughly analyze current software development practices, involving practitioners and possibly working from inside the companies. This article contributes to this research line by reporting an experimental study conducted with software companies. The study has confirmed that still too many companies either neglect usability and UX, or do not properly consider them. Interesting problems emerged. This article gives suggestions on how they may be properly addressed, since their solution is the starting point for reducing the gap between research and practice of usability and UX. It also provides further evidence on the value of the research method, called Cooperative Method Development, based on the collaboration of researchers and practitioners in carrying out empirical research; it has been used in a step of the performed study and has revealed to be instrumental for showing practitioners why to improve their development processes and how to do so.

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.

Similarity-Based Forecasting with Simultaneous Previews: A River Plot Interface for Time Series Forecasting

Time-series forecasting has a large number of applications. Users with a partial time series for auctions, new stock offerings, or industrial processes desire estimates of the future behavior. We present a data driven forecasting method and interface called similarity-based forecasting (SBF). A pattern matching search in an historical time series dataset produces a subset of curves similar to the partial time series. The forecast is displayed graphically as a river plot showing statistical information about the SBF subset. A forecasting preview interface allows users to interactively explore alternative pattern matching parameters and see multiple forecasts simultaneously. User testing with 8 users demonstrated advantages and led to improvements.

Experiencing the Past through the Senses: An M-Learning Game at Archaeological Parks

M-learning the combination of e-learn- ling with mobile technologies captures the very nature of e-learning by providing users with independence from the constraints of time and location.1 To exploit the potential of mobile technologies for learning, researchers must define new teaching and learning techniques.2 The Explore! m-learning system implements an excursion-game technique to help middle school students (ages 11 through 13) acquire historic knowledge while playing in an archaeological park.

End users as co-designers of their own tools and products

In our Age of exponential technological advance, recent developments are determining an evolution of end users from passive information consumers into information producers. Users are increasingly willing and, indeed, determined to shape the software they use to tailor it to their own needs. Based on a brief review of research activities we performed in the last decade, this paper analyzes some challenges that software designers face to comply with the new roles of end users in the software life cycle, and discusses how to provide end users with software environments that empower them to become co-designers of their own tools and products. The examples reported in the paper show why and how end users are involved in design activities in various application domains.

Mobile games to foster the learning of history at archaeological sites

This paper presents a system designed to support young students learning history at an archaeological site, by exploiting mobile technology. The approach uses game-play, since it stimulates in young students an understanding of history that would otherwise be difficult to engender, helping players to acquire historical notions and making archaeological visits more effective and exciting. A strength of the system is that, by running on the visitors own cellular phones, it requires minimal investments and small changes to the existing site exhibition.

Integrating User Data and Collaborative Filtering in a Web Recommendation System

Web-based applications with a large variety of users suffer from the inability to satisfy heterogeneous needs. Systems should be capable of adapting their behavior to the users characteristics, such as goals, tasks, interests, which are stored in user profiles. Filtering techniques are used to analyse profile data and provide recommendation to the users to help them navigating in the site and retrieving information of interest. We describe here the approach we have adopted in FAIRWIS (Trade FAIR Web-based Information Services), a system that offers on-line innovative services to support the management of real trade fairs as well as Web-based virtual fairs. The approach is based on the integration of data the system collects about users, both explicitly and implicitly, and a classical collaborative filtering technique in order to provide appropriate recommendations to the user in any circumstances during the visit of the on-line fair catalogue.

Visualizing association rules in a framework for visual data mining

The abundance of data available nowadays fosters the need of developing tools and methodologies to help users in extracting significant information. Visual data mining is going in this direction, exploiting data mining algorithms and methodologies together with information visualization techniques. The demand for visual and interactive analysis tools is particularly pressing in the Association Rules context where often the user has to analyze hundreds of rules in order to grasp valuable knowledge. In this paper, we present a visual strategy that exploits a graph-based technique and parallel coordinates to visualize the results of association rule mining algorithms. This helps data miners to get an overview of the rule set they are interacting with and enables them to deeper investigate inside a specific set of rules. The tools developed are embedded in a framework for Visual Data Mining that is briefly described.