Tommaso Turchi

Fostering the adoption of Pervasive Displays in public spaces using tangible End-User Programming

Nowadays we are continuously surrounded by new digital systems featuring easy to use and engaging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, gesture, tangible, or voice interaction. The enriched and natural experience provided by this new paradigm - known as Natural User Interface - has promoted its adoption in many ubiquitous contexts due to its effectiveness in dealing with a wide audience of mostly inexperienced users; Pervasive Displays, namely variously-sized displays ecosystems supporting simultaneous interactions with public screens naturally use those new paradigms. Nonetheless, if we want these systems to stay out in public spaces for long periods of time, they must provide users with an easy way of being adapted to their heterogeneous usage contexts. In this paper, we propose an End- User Programming approach to this problem introducing TAPAS, a system that combines a tangible interaction with a puzzle metaphor, allowing users to create workflows on a Pervasive Display to satisfy their needs; we also carried out a preliminary evaluation of our system with second year university students and interaction designers, gathering useful feedback to improve TAPAS and employ it in many other domains.

Fostering computational thinking skills with a tangible blocks programming environment

Computational Thinking has recently returned into the limelight as an essential skill to have for both the general public and disciplines outside Computer Science. It encapsulates those thinking skills integral to solving complex problems using a computer, thus widely applicable in our technological society. Several public initiatives such as the Hour of Code successfully introduced it to millions of people of different ages and backgrounds, mostly using Blocks Programming Environments like Scratch that lower the barriers of programming and facilitate learning. In this paper we present our arguments for fostering Computational Thinking skills using a Blocks Programming Environment augmented with a Tangible User Interface, namely by exploiting objects whose interactions with the physical environment are mapped to digital actions performed on the system. Our demonstration includes a working prototype implementing our Tangible Blocks Programming Environment called TAPAS.

TAPAS: A tangible End-User Development tool supporting the repurposing of Pervasive Displays ☆

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version. Under embargo until 8 June 2018. The final, definitive version is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2016.11.002, published by Elsevier Ltd.

Pervasive Displays in the Wild: Employing End User Programming in Adaption and Re-Purposing

The declining hardware cost has enabled the wide spread of Pervasive Displays anywhere within urban spaces; these systems are composed of displays of various sizes and allow users to interact with the same public screens simultaneously, usually through new and engaging modalities, e.g. Tangible Interaction. Yet the frequent changes in users’ needs dictate a continuous adaption and re-purposing of such systems with new and focused features, in order to prevent interest to wear off and overcome people’s low expectations of their content value; currently this process has to be done by site managers, and this tedious and necessary task prevented long-term deployments. In this paper we propose to use End User Programming to empower users with the ability to adapt Pervasive Displays to their continuously evolving requirements. We conducted a preliminary study involving university students, gathering scenario’s requirements and initial feedback on a prototype we developed.

Treemaps and the Visual Comparison of Hierarchical Multi-Attribute Data

Treemaps have the desirable property of presenting overviews along with details of data and thus are of interest in visualizations of multi-attribute tabular data with attribute hierarchies. However, the original treemap algorithms and most subsequent variations are hampered in making parallel structures in a hierarchical data structure visually comparable. Structurally parallel elements are not aligned, making it difficult to compare them visually. We propose a method that allows for proportional and non-proportional subdivisions of subtrees while preserving visual alignment of parallel structures. We extend the framework so that other types of data visualizations can be placed within the graphical areas of a treemap to allow for the visual comparison of a broad collection of data types including temporal data.

A Human-Centred Tangible approach to learning Computational Thinking

Computational Thinking has recently become a focus of many teaching and research domains; it encapsulates those thinking skills integral to solving complex problems using a computer, thus being widely applicable in our society. It is influencing research across many disciplines and also coming into the limelight of education, mostly thanks to public initiatives such as the Hour of Code. In this paper we present our arguments for promoting Computational Thinking in education through the Human-centred paradigm of Tangible End-User Development, namely by exploiting objects whose interactions with the physical environment are mapped to digital actions performed on the system. Received on 18 July 2016; accepted on 20 July 2016; published on 23 August 2016

An ant-colony based approach for real-time implicit collaborative information seeking

We propose an approach based on Swarm Intelligence — more specifically on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) — to improve search engines’ performance and reduce information overload by exploiting collective users’ behavior. We designed and developed three different algorithms that employ an ACO-inspired strategy to provide implicit collaborative-seeking features in real time to search engines. The three different algorithms — NaiveRank, RandomRank, and SessionRank — leverage on different principles of ACO in order to exploit users’ interactions and provide them with more relevant results. We designed an evaluation experiment employing two widely used standard datasets of query-click logs issued to two major Web search engines. The results demonstrated how each algorithm is suitable to be employed in ranking results of different types of queries depending on users’ intent.

Block-oriented programming with tangibles: An engaging way to learn computational thinking skills

Block-oriented programming environments, such as Scratch and AppInventor, have become mainstream and have helped introduce non-programmers to algorithmic thinking; that is, to computational thinking (CT) skills. In various experiments, referenced in this paper, we observed how objects (tangibles) augmented with digital properties — that is, tangible user interface (TUI) objects — can help develop CT skills. We investigate which paradigm can be used to introduce CT skills with TUIs. By drawing on past experience, we conclude that block-oriented programming provides a suitable answer to our research questions. Furthermore, we introduce a framework for implementing block-oriented programmable objects that we believe can help end-users learn CT skills.

Collaborative Information Seeking with Ant Colony Ranking in Real-Time

In this paper we propose a new ranking algorithm based on Swarm Intelligence, more specifically on the Ant Colony Optimization technique, to improve search engines’ performances and reduce the information overload by exploiting users’ collective behavior. We designed an online evaluation involving end users to test our algorithm in a real-world scenario dealing with informational queries. The development of a fully working prototype – based on the Wikipedia search engine – demonstrated promising preliminary results.

A tangible-programming technology supporting end-user development of smart-environments

In recent years, smart objects are increasingly pervading the environments we live in. For HCI researchers, an important challenge is how non-technical users can establish the behavior of such devices. This poster presents a new technology implementing a tangible-programming paradigm, which allows non-programmers to synchronize the behavior of ecologies of smart objects, thus determining the creation and customization of smart environments.