Alessio Malizia

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at Brunel University London

Large-scale Text-to-image Generative Models (LTGMs) are a cutting-edge class of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms specifically designed to generate images from natural language descriptions (prompts). These models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in creating high-quality images from a wide range of inputs, making them powerful tools...

Chatbot-based tools becoming pervasive in multiple domains from commercial websites to rehabilitation applications. Only recently an eleven-item satisfaction inventory was developed (the chatBot Usbaliy Scale, BUS-11) to help designers in the assessment process of their systems. The BUS-11 has been validated in multiple contexts and languages i.e.,...

The Bot Usability Scale (BUS) is a standardised tool to assess and compare the satisfaction of users after interacting with chatbots to support the development of usable conversational systems. The English version of the 15-item BUS scale (BUS-15) was the result of an exploratory factorial analysis; a confirmatory factorial analysis tests the repli...

During the last decade, touchless gestural interfaces have been widely studied as one of the most promising interaction paradigms in the context of pervasive displays. In particular, avatars and silhouettes have proved to be effective in making the touchless capacity of displays self-evident. In this paper, we focus on a child–display interaction a...

Standardised tools to assess a user’s satisfaction with the experience of using chatbots and conversational agents are currently unavailable. This work describes four studies, including a systematic literature review, with an overall sample of 141 participants in the survey (experts and novices), focus group sessions and testing of chatbots to (i)...

Tabletop Role-Playing Games transport the player to a fantastical fictional world. This world is inhabited by characters, players and objects. Prior to the commencement of play, the Dungeon Master prepares not only the rules of the world but an account of historical events and the current world state. While the rules provide the player with boundar...

With the development of sophisticated algorithms and partially autonomous features, automobile drivers are increasingly facing new experiences and changing their behaviour inside the automobile. To properly investigate improvements in cars from a human-centred design perspective, further understanding of emotional experience appears to be needed. I...

The five-volume set LNCS 12932-12936 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2021, held in Bari, Italy, in August/September 2021. The total of 105 full papers presented together with 72 short papers and 70 other papers in these books was carefully reviewed and selected from...

The five-volume set LNCS 12932-12936 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2021, held in Bari, Italy, in August/September 2021. The total of 105 full papers presented together with 72 short papers and 70 other papers in these books was carefully reviewed and selected from...

The five-volume set LNCS 12932-12936 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2021, held in Bari, Italy, in August/September 2021. The total of 105 full papers presented together with 72 short papers and 70 other papers in these books was carefully reviewed and selected from...

The five-volume set LNCS 12932-12936 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2021, held in Bari, Italy, in August/September 2021. The total of 105 full papers presented together with 72 short papers and 70 other papers in these books was carefully reviewed and selected from...

Automation in computing systems has always been considered a valuable solution to unburden the user. Internet of Things (IoT) technology best suits automation in different domains, such as home automation, retail, industry, and transportation, to name but a few. While these domains are strongly characterized by implicit user interaction, more recen...

Knowledge about the expected interaction duration and expected distance from which users will interact with public displays can be useful in many ways. For example, knowing upfront that a certain setup will lead to shorter interactions can nudge space owners to alter the setup. If a system can predict that incoming users will interact at a long dis...

An investigation was performed of the characteristics of real-time, virtually present, contextual inquiry between automobile drivers and automotive designers. 28 participants were remotely interviewed while they were in one of two contexts: either sitting in a bare isolated meeting room or when operating a driving simulator. Open questions of the t...

Students in higher education are traditionally requested to produce various pieces of written work during the courses they undertake. When students' work is submitted online as a whole, both the ethically questionable act of procrastinating and late submissions afect performance. The objective of this paper is to assess the performance of students...

The growing sophistication of technologies and sociological advances are major causes for the dramatic change the automotive sector is currently undergoing. To address changes from a human-centered design perspective an improved understanding of the occupants’ emotional experience and behavior is required. Facial-Expression Analysis (FEA) is an eme...

Smart Interactive Experiences (SIEs) are usage situations enabled by the Internet of Things that empower users to interact with the surrounding environment. The goal of our research is to define methodologies and software environments to support the design of SIEs; more specifically, we focus on design paradigms suitable for experts of given domain...

Patent infringement detection usually implies research among documents in different forms, in both natural and unstructured language, often involving a lot of human resources and time. In order to ease this patent check process, we previously presented a visual tool to be used by designers themselves at any stage of the design process, providing th...

During the last decade, touchless gestural interfaces have been widely studied as one of the most promising interaction paradigms in the context of pervasive displays. In particular, avatars and silhouettes have been proved to be effective in communicating the touchless gestural interactivity supported by displays. In the paper, we take a child-dis...

Accessible Head Mounted Displays (HMD) have provided mass access to Extended Reality (XR) content as never before. One of the key complaints from HMD owners, however, is the lack of substantial high-quality content (Moore 2017). Coupled with the domain-specific topic of presence, which describes a state beyond the concept of immersion instead with...

A recent contribution to the ongoing debate concerning the concept of usability and its measures proposed that usability reached a dead end – i.e. a construct unable to provide stable results and to unify scientific knowledge. Extensive commentaries rejected the conclusion that researchers need to look for alternative constructs to measure the qual...

Algorithms are more and more pervading our everyday life: from automatic checkouts in supermarkets and e-banking to booking a flight online. Understanding an algorithmic solution to a problem is a very relevant activity to improve end-users’ involvement. To this end, adopting a meta-design approach may help to support end-users to appropriate the d...

Technological and sociological developments in the automotive sector are shifting the focus of design towards developing a better understanding of driver needs, desires and emotions. Human centred design methods are being more frequently applied to automotive research, including the use of systems to detect human emotions in real-time. One method f...

The increasing complexity of patented mechanical designs means that their novelty and inventive steps increasingly rely on interacting geometric features and how they contribute to device functions. These features and interactions are normally incorporated in patents through clear patent claims. However, patents can be difficult to interpret and un...

Envision a future where the physical and digital become seamlessly intertwined producing unbounded possibilities from interactions with autonomous cars to the advent of smart cities. Tools and methods to explore the design and development of such emergent hybrid spaces will need to be highly inclusive involving engineers, social scientists, up to c...

This short paper presents the initial research insights of an ongoing research project that focuses upon understanding the role of landscape, its use as a resource for designing interfaces for musical expression, and as a tool for leveraging ethnographic understandings about space, place, design and musical expression. We briefly discuss the emergi...

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 ecol...

Many prior works investigated the potential of pervasive technologies and interactive applications to increase access capabilities to digital content for people with disability, particularly Neuro-Developmental Disorders (NDDs). In this paper, we present an exploratory study aimed at understanding if an avatar-based touchless gestural interface is...

In some mechanical engineering devices the novelty or inventive step of a patented design relies heavily upon how geometric features contribute to device functions. Communicating the functional interactions between geometric features in existing patented designs may increase a designer’s awareness of the prior art and thereby avoid conflict with th...

One of the main time and money consuming tasks in the design of industrial devices and parts is the checking of possible patent infringements. Indeed, the great number of documents to be mined and the wide variety of technical language used to describe inventions are reasons why considerable amounts of time may be needed. On the other hand, the ear...

Human-Like Computing technologies are intelligent systems that interact with people in human-like way. By bringing together the disciplines of Artificial Intelligence, Ethnography and Interaction Design, and applying them in a real world context we are able to understand some of the ways that such technologies can be applied. This work in progress...

Exploratory design workshops were conducted using five participatory methods with 10 automobile drivers in order to understand what characterizes natural-feeling interaction with automobiles’ secondary, comfort, and infotainment controls. Hands-on, artefact-focused methods were selected for their potential to understand these familiar but character...

In the last two decades, we have witnessed a growing spread of touchless interfaces, facilitated by higher performances of computational systems, as well as the increased availability of cheaper sensors and devices. Putting the focus on gestural input, several researchers and designers used Kinect-like devices to implement touchless gestural interf...

Nowadays companies strive to stay competitive in the market by introducing innovative products and protecting their Intellectual Property by filing patents. However, with an increasing number of patents granted each year, designers face challenges in producing novel designs and patentable inventions such that early identification of potential paten...

Eco-labelling is the practice of eco information provision that most directly addresses consumer behaviour. Nowadays, consumers are facing difficulties in perceiving and understanding existing eco labels. In previous work, we proposed the conceptual framework of eco information individualisation which tailors eco labels according to the specific ne...

In recent years, touchless-enabling technologies have been more and more adopted for providing public displays with gestural interactivity. This has led to the need for novel visual interfaces aimed at solving issues such as communicating interactivity to users, as well as supporting immediate usability and "natural" interactions. In this paper, we...

Twenty-five years past the Weiser’s vision of Ubiquitous Computing, and there is not a clear understanding of what is or is not a pervasive system. Due to the loose boundaries of such paradigm, almost any kind of remotely accessible networked system is classified as a pervasive system. We think that is mainly due to the lack of killer applications...

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...

In many EU countries there is a requirement to count research, i.e., to measure and prove its value. These numbers, often produced automatically based on the impact of journals, are used to rank universities, to determine fund distribution, to evaluate research proposals, and to determine the scientific merit of each researcher. While the real valu...

These days we are witnessing a spread of many new digital systems in public spaces featuring easy to use and engaging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, gestures, tangible, and voice. This new user-centered paradigm — known as the NUI — aims to provide a more natural and rich experience to end users; this supports its adoption in many ubi...

Have you ever thought of lying to your smartphone to protect your privacy? Everyday we face a dilemma about privacy: We take advantage of apps that are able to use our location or data to provide smart services at the expense of privacy (we all know our data can be supplied to third parties), or we cling on to our privacy and ignore the benefits of...

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 publi...

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 sce...

While educational technology has a long pedigree, the last few years have seen dramatic changes. These have included the rise and institutionalisation of MOOCs, and other web-based initiatives such as Kahn Academy and Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU). Classrooms have also been transformed with growing use of mobile devices and forms of flipped classr...

Public displays have lately become ubiquitous thanks to the decreasing cost of such technology and public policies supporting the development of smart cities. Depending on form factor, those displays might use touchless gestural interfaces that therefore are becoming more often the subject of public and private research. In this paper, we focus on...

In the last decades, we have witnessed to the increase of the socalled Kinect-like devices, which are based on a set of low-cost sensors to acquire RGB and depth data of a scene. The high accessibility of such devices, mainly in terms of costs, has pushed their adoption as fundamental tool for gesture recognition in a large number of applications,...

In this chapter we describe experience in the design and installation of a low-cost multi-touch table in a rural island community. We discuss the creation of the table including: pragmatic challenges of installation, and then re-installation as the physical fabric of the multi-purpose building (café, cinema, meeting area and cattle market) altered;...

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...

In the near future, we can easily imagine a significant increment in diffusion of networked public displays, as well as novel interaction modalities used in their applications. In the following, we present two of the main challenges related to networked displays we are dealing with, with a particular focus on touchless gestural interfaces: overcomi...

Public displays, typically equipped with touchscreens, are used for interactions in public spaces, such as streets or fairs. Currently low-cost visual sensing technologies, such as Kinect-like devices and high quality cameras, allow to easily implement touchless interfaces. Nevertheless, the arising interactions have not yet been fully investigated...

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...

With technology changing the nature of the driving task, qualitative methods can help designers understand and measure driver-car interaction naturalness. Fifteen drivers were interviewed at length in their own parked cars using ethnographically-inspired questions probing issues of interaction salience, expectation, feelings, desires and meanings....

In the last 25 years we have witnessed the rise and growth of interactive tabletop research, both in academic and in industrial settings. The rising demand for the digital support of human activities motivated the need to bring computational power to table surfaces. In this article, we review the state of the art of tabletop computing, highlighting...

Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could beco...

The future of pervasive public display networks is loaded with high expectations. Non-commercial displays are commonly envisaged as proliferating in numerous contexts and domains, where they offer various uses for a variety of everyday users. In this paper we discuss why this vision is perhaps over optimistic and the realities of deploying, designi...

This paper discusses the design, development and deployment of a large projected multi-touch surface within a rural context. Based on our previous work we deployed the system and worked in a real world setting in order to understand how it might be used in this particular scenario and to further understand the issues involved in using such systems...

This Studio will involve participants creating interactions with physical and digital elements. They will have the opportunity to use a toolkit we developed that combines physical and digital widgets into a unique environment to allow the rapid setup of device ecologies. Therefore, participants will be able to explore how the toolkit support to phy...

Crowdsourcing is a distributed approach in which people participate and share information over the Web (e.g. Facebook or Twitter). This distributed model has proved to be helpful in accelerating the perception of what occurred, where it happened, and who needed help in recent disasters such as the Boston Marathon bombs, the Oklahoma tornado or the...

This paper reports upon an engagement-based study that was carried out on the Isle of Tiree (the Inner Hebrides, Scotland). The purpose of the study was to examine the use of a tabletop projection system as a mechanism to allow some of the islands inhabitants to initially discuss their understanding of data, data needs and to further explicate the...

The design and development of a Digital Library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language in order to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling...

In this paper, we propose an approach for enhancing the usability of Web services. Our approach is based on a set of common interaction characteristics permeating through several interaction design methodologies, such as User-Centred Design, Participatory Design, Meta-Design and Semiotic Engineering. We identified transparency and meta-communicatio...

The interaction design for web emergency management information systems (WEMIS) is an important aspect to keep in mind due to the criticality of the domain: decision making, updating available resources, defining a task list, and trusting in proposed information. A common interaction design strategy for WEMIS seems to be needed, but currently there...

During and after crisis situations people are interested in getting knowledge about what happened and in obtaining information regarding damages, victims, and possible repercussions. Social network systems represent powerful sources due to their rapid growth in the last few years and the amount of continuous updated information published by people....

Third generation devices, such as smartphones, have the possibility of knowing the position of the user. By combining time, position and data in the Cloud it is possible to make smart deductions as to what information the user needs. These deductions can be performed by an automated assistant that have access to the user's e-mail and SMS messages,...

Visualization of set-valued attributes in multi-dimensional information visualization systems remains a relatively unexplored problem. Here we introduce a novel method for visualizing set-valued attributes that we call the singleton set distribution view and integrate it into an interactive multi-dimensional attribute visualization tool utilizing p...

Modeling Web users as virtual ants offers a promising new solution to the challenge of information-retrieval optimization.

In this paper we describe the results that we have obtained while integrating algorithm visualization (AV) movies (strongly tightened with the other teaching material), within a first-year undergraduate course on algorithms and data structures. Our experimental results seem to support the hypothesis that making these movies available significantly...

Toward user-defined gestural interfaces.

Increasing the visibility and access to underlying file structure on consumer devices can vastly improve the user experience.

Recent work in multi-touch tabletop interaction introduced many novel techniques that let people manipulate digital content through touch. Yet most only detect touch blobs. This ignores richer interactions that would be possible if we could identify (1) which part of the hand, (2) which side of the hand, and (3) which person is actually touching th...

Instead of just adding functions and new gadgets to current devices, we should ensure that users get the full benefits of the new technology.

A number of researchers conducted a study to demonstrate collateral effects of using algorithm visualizations (AV). An experiment was performed to evaluate the difference in efficacy of using AVs in individual and collaborative learning situations. Some students of the first year of an undergraduate program in computer science were asked to partici...

Everything that can be invented has been invented." Although this infamous 1899 quote has been attributed to Charles H. Duell, then director of the US Patent Office, he actually never said such a silly thing. What Duell said to the US Congress was something quite different, that America's future success depends on invention (http://tinyurl.com/3pja...

The use of pattern languages is not so straightforward since itsusers have to identify the patterns they need, browsing the language and understanding both the benefits and trade-offs of each pattern as well as the relations and interactions it has with other patterns. Novice designers might benefit from tools that assist them in this learning task...

The interaction design for web emergency management information systems (WEMIS) is an important aspect to keep in mind due to the criticality of the domain: decision making, updating available resources, defining a task list, trusting in proposed information. A common interaction design strategy for WEMIS seems to be needed but currently there are...

In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, a...

Pattern languages might be useful tools for design as far as designers can identify the right patterns. For this users need to understand the relationships between patterns and how to combine them. In this process, knowing how patterns have been used by other designers might help in identifying the best combination of solutions. In this paper we pr...

The design of domain specific information systems, like Emergency Management Systems, has to rely on the participation of experts with different backgrounds. Such multi-disciplinary process is often characterized by misunderstandings and communication problems. In this context, design patterns might be a useful tool to communicate ideas since patte...

Touchless interaction techniques do not require physical contact while interacting with a system so to allow natural interaction with digital information, made tangible in the physical world through pervasive screen displays. In this project we explore the use of Nintendo Wii Remote controller as a touchless interface for interacting with map based...

We're living in a world where information processing isn't confined to desktop computers-it's being integrated into everyday objects and activities. Pervasive computation is human centered: it permeates our physical world, helping us achieve goals and fulfill our needs with minimum effort by exploiting natural interaction styles. Remote interaction...

12 pages, 11 figures. Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. Reaching this goal is challenging due to users’ diversity: people with disabilities, elderly and children, and other vulnerable groups. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approac...

In the virtual world, implemented by the Internet, Web, satellite navigation, and other technologies, people are also roaming around that exploits the knowledge of others by following their trails. The advantage of utilizing trails is that they are adaptive, systems can catch all types of trails, and the program only has to distinguishes trails-it...

Web 2.0 can be viewed as a platform where users can develop their own web applications. It is also characterized by a vast amount of user-generated contents presenting spatial and temporal components, by means of associated metadata. These metadata has been successfully exploited to generate map-based mashups (web applications gathering data from d...

In the last 20 years we have assisted to the birth and growth of the World Wide Web. It rapidly changed from a tool conceived for scientists at CERN, into a global information network, populated by billions of users. Currently, we are experiencing another change within the Web paradigm, where the Web is viewed as a read/write tool enhancing users'...

The User Experience (UX) is a crucial factor for designing and enhancing the user satisfaction when interacting with a computational tool or with a system. Thus, measuring the UX can be very effective when designing or updating a Web site. Currently, there are many Web sites that rely on collaborative tagging: such systems allow users to add labels...

The basic idea of service-oriented learning is that a learning environment should be conceived as a set of independent units of learning packaged as learning services. The design, development and deployment of a learning system based on integrating different learning services needs both a technological platform to support the system as well as a me...

10 pages, 5 figures.-- Book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5616/2009. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a hurricane approaching); so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for Emergency Management Systems. In this work an ontology was developed by...

The integration of usable and flexible analysis support in modelling environments is a key success factor in Model-Driven Development. In this paradigm, models are the core asset from which code is automatically generated, and thus ensuring model correctness is a fundamental quality control activity. For this purpose, a common approach is to transf...

10 pages, 7 figures.-- Contributed to: 6th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Respose and Management (ISCRAM2009, Göteborg, Sweden, May 10-13, 2009). Later published as article in: International Journal of Emergency Management, vol. 6, n. 3-4, p. 302-316 (11 February 2010), http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJEM.2009.031568 In this...

The User Experience (UX) is a crucial factor for designing and enhancing the user satisfaction when interacting with a computational tool or with a system. Thus, measuring the UX can be very effective when designing or updating a Web site. Currently, there are many Web sites that rely on collaborative tagging: such systems allow users to add labels...