Amon RappUniversità degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Dipartimento di Informatica
Amon Rapp
Professor
About
142
Publications
78,894
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
3,069
Citations
Introduction
I study how people make sense of their personal data collected through self-tracking technologies and how we can motivate and engage individuals by using design techniques coming from the world of video games. In doing so, I explore the opportunities offered by the ethnographic methods for understanding the impacts of technology in situated practices. Recently, I started researching systems for changing behavior and design techniques to support reflection on the long-term impacts of technology.
Additional affiliations
November 2019 - February 2021
Publications
Publications (142)
Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) has rapidly advanced in recent years, potentially producing enormous impacts on industries, societies, and individuals in the near future. In particular, Gen-AI text-to-image models allow people to easily create high-quality images possibly revolutionizing human creative practices. Despite their increasin...
Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly becoming pervasive in everyday life of everyone. In this setting, developing correct AI conception since childhood is not only a need to be addressed in educational curricula, but is also a children right. Accordingly, several initiatives at national and international levels aim at promoting AI and emerging te...
Wearable trackers are believed to enhance users' self-knowledge, but their impact on the relationship that people have with their own bodies is relatively unexplored. This study aims to shed light on the potential of physiological data collected by a commercial wearable activity tracker to influence how users relate with their own bodies, specifica...
This edited collection brings in multiple scholarly perspectives to examine the impact of the pandemic and resulting government policies, especially lockdowns, on one particular cultural sphere: games.
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually every aspect of our lives, regardless of where we live. In the initial months, many industry reports no...
The amount of news on the web often confuses the ideas of the reader, who struggles to disentangle information that is sometimes contradictory and difficult to decipher. In the face of such an articulated scenario, the role played by schools is absolutely central: the development of critical thinking in young people (and by extension in their famil...
Users of online recipe websites tend to prefer unhealthy foods. Their popularity undermines the healthiness of traditional food recommender systems, as many users lack nutritional knowledge to make informed food decisions. Moreover, the presented information is often unrelated to nutrition or difficult to understand. To alleviate this, we present a...
Ambiguity is gaining attention in self-tracking research as a means to go beyond the mere quantification of body signals. Recent research has suggested that ambiguity can be used even to enable social connection mediated by personal data. To explore this design space more widely, we organized two design workshops with a total of 67 participants. In...
Researcher protection is a growing concern within game research. Researchers who investigate game communities are subject to
online harassment, exacerbating the lack of information available in preparation for academic work. In this workshop, we invite
researchers to share their experiences and thoughts on methodological challenges and risks that t...
People have different interests and cognitive capabilities that should be taken into account when developing technological support for cultural heritage exploration. In this project, we aim to help people with autism to plan a tourist trip by taking into account their interests and their cognitive skills. We plan to personalize the suggestion of to...
The majority of behavior change and persuasive technologies are exclusively addressed to modify a specific behavior. However, the focus on behavior may cloud the “existential aspects” of the process of change. To explore the lived and meaning-laden experience of behavior change, we interviewed 23 individuals who have used a behavior change technolo...
Cheating is a major concern for any gaming environment, but effective solutions are still far from being found. Previous research has overlooked the social complexity of current video games and the role that technology may have in determining the cheating practices. In this article, we explore how cheating unfolds within Call of Duty: Warzone throu...
A central problem for chatbots in the customer care domain revolves around how people collaborate with the agent to achieve their own situated goals. The majority of the previous research, however, relied on experiments within artificial settings, rather than on observation of real-world interactions. Moreover, such research mostly analyzed users’...
Autism is characterized by peculiar sensory processing. The sensory features of a place may have a crucial impact on the decision a person with autism makes when choosing what to visit in a tourist experience. We present a map-based mobile app, conceived for people with mid to high-functioning autism, which exploits sensory features of places to fi...
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is a multidisciplinary field of research that focuses on the understanding and design of interaction between humans and computers. HCI has its roots in human factors and ergonomics and cognitive sciences, but over the years, it has undergone a variety of deep transformations, by importing a variety of approaches, th...
Wearable technologies are increasing both in number and variety enabling new ways for collecting personal data, as well as novel interaction modalities. Even though the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has widely explored the potential applications of wearables, its theoretical contribution on this research field has been far from impress...
In this article, we investigate the case of human-machine dialogues in the specific domain of commercial customer care. We built a corpus of conversations between users and a customer-care chatbot of an Italian Telecom Company, focusing on a sample of conversations where users contact the service asking for explanations about billing issues or over...
The idea of time as an existential concern has found scarce attention in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. Still, time in our life is mostly experienced in connection with important existential matters. Life changes are emblematic examples of aspects of our existence that are fundamentally temporal. In this article, I explore how peop...
"In recent decades, work has been going through a series of transformations leading to the rise of virtual organizations and to the spread of gamification practices. On the other side, also play activities have been going through a process of “workification”, with the rise of phenomena such as “grinding” in video games. Nowadays, the boundaries bet...
The availability of wearable devices recently boosted the popularity of self-tracking technologies. Self-trackers are involved in a complex process of knowledge development, but this cannot be achieved without knowing the body. However, self-tracking devices seem to embrace an abstract and scattered conception of the body, based on unrelated number...
The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic changes in people's lives. The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community widely investigated technology use during crises. However, commercial video games received minor attention. In this article, we describe how video game play impacted the life transformations engendered by the pandemic. We administered a q...
The PIUMA app aims at allowing users with autism to explore their city, finding new places that can be interesting for them but at the same time do not annoy them. Users can navigate the city through an interactive map that is both personalized and crowdsourced.
This special issue focuses on new perspectives of time within HCI research. We begin by explicating how HCI’s views of time have broadened over the years, going beyond the traditional subjective-objective dichotomy. We describe how the HCI community was originally anchored to clock time, but more recently the field has begun to incorporate the exis...
Game-based interventions have been gradually and successfully implemented in the mental health domain given the games’ ability to positively affect a variety of mental health conditions. To this aim, scholars have recently discovered the usefulness of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) video games, due to their increasing popularity, availability, and...
Users of food recommender systems typically prefer popular recipes, which tend to be unhealthy. To encourage users to select healthier recommendations by making more informed food decisions, we introduce a methodology to generate and present a natural language justification that emphasizes the nutritional content, or health risks and benefits of re...
In this paper, we present a qualitative study on speleology that aims to widen the current understanding of people's practices in Nature and identify a design space for technology that supports such practices. Speleology is a practice based on the discovery, study, and dissemination of natural cavities. Speleologists are amateur experts who often c...
Over the last ten years there has been a growing interest around text-based chatbots, software applications interacting with humans using natural written language. However, despite the enthusiastic market predictions, ‘conversing’ with this kind of agents seems to raise issues that go beyond their current technological limitations, directly involvi...
Researchers and developers constantly seek novel ways to create engaging applications that are able to retain their users over the long term, make them desire to spend time using the application or go back to using it after a break. With this aim, video games can be an insightful source of inspiration, as they are specifically designed to maximise...
In this paper, we present a qualitative study on speleology that aims to widen the current understanding of people's practices in Nature and identify a design space for technology that supports such practices. Speleology is a practice based on the discovery, study, and dissemination of natural cavities. Speleologists are amateur experts who often c...
A central process of virtual organization design relates to how newcomers are assimilated into organizational dynamics. Research on organizational assimilation has traditionally investigated 'serious' organizational contexts. Nonetheless, video games can offer insights on how such assimilation can be effectively supported. In this article, I propos...
Design ethnography has been widely used in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to understand people’s everyday behaviors, in order to build technologies capable of meeting users’ needs. Building on top of the recent debate on ethnography within HCI, this article proposes to employ reflexivity and theoretical pluralism to ground a new way of using desi...
Cultural Heritage exploration is interesting for the development of
inclusive tourist guides because it exposes visitors to different types
of challenges, from steering content recommendation to visitors’
interests and cognitive capabilities, to the suggestion of places
that can be effectively reached and visited under different types of
constraint...
Increasingly, people are making use of diverse digital services that create many types of personal data. The most recent addition to such services are self-tracking devices that are capable of creating very detailed personal activity records. The focus of this special issue is to explore how such activity records can be exploited to provide user-ce...
The use of information technology for executing a wide array of alliances in order to seize specific market opportunities is making emerge new forms of “virtual organizations.” Virtual organizations rely on teams that are temporary or geographically dispersed and may even include forms of crowd working and crowdsourcing. The opportunities and issue...
People with autism have idiosyncratic sensory experiences, which may impact on how they live the “spaces” of their everyday life. Starting from an investigation of their conception and experience of “secure places,” we defined a series of user requirements for designing technology that supports their everyday movements in the urban environment. On...
The spread of wearable technologies is paving the way for the mass-scale adoption of self-tracking instruments, which are progressively integrating into different social practices. Among these, sport seems to be a promising domain in which Personal Informatics tools can support individuals in performing their activities and in achieving their situa...
The crowdsourcing paradigm applied to the urban environment (i.e., people while moving can provide data from different places) may play a fundamental role in transforming users in significant actors of the places in which they live. In the last years, several crowdsourcing services have been developed to allow citizens to collaborate, by collecting...
Recommender systems (RSs) are systems that produce individualized recommendations as output or drive the user in a personalized way to interesting or useful objects in a space of possible options. Recently, RSs emerged as an effective support for decision making. However, when people make decisions, they usually take into account different and ofte...
Over the last few years, user modeling scenery is changing. With the recent advancements in ubiquitous and wearables technologies, the amount and type of data that can be gathered about users and used to build user models is expanding. User Model can now be enriched with data regarding different aspects of people’s everyday lives. All these changes...
Mobile applications have a great potential in making everyday environments more accessible from the cognitive point of view, allowing neurodiverse people, such as individuals with autism, dementia, or ADHD, to gain independency and find continuous support. This workshop will discuss the main technological, methodological, theoretical and design iss...
This paper describes the preliminary results of a project aimed to support people with autism in finding city places that match their "sensorial" preferences and aversions. Through a participatory design approach, we designed an interactive map that collects sensorial data about the urban environment exploiting crowdsourcing mechanisms.
Design fictions describe non-existing prototype devices and services, encouraging reflection on technology matters. However, until now most of the fictional design work has been carried out either by “experts” to foster critical thinking within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community, or by user groups to mostly define requirements for creat...
The crowdsourcing paradigm (i.e., people while moving provide data from different places) can play a fundamental role in transforming users in significant actors in society. In the last years, several crowdsourcing services have been developed to allow citizens to collaborate collecting data about urban accessibility, but focusing mainly on physica...
Gamification is now a well-established technique in Human-Computer Interaction. However, research on gamification still faces a variety of empirical and theoretical challenges. Firstly, studies of gamified systems typically focus narrowly on understanding individuals. short-term interactions with the system, ignoring more difficult to measure outco...
This paper presents a literature review of human–computer interaction works on wearable systems for sports. We selected a corpus of 57 papers and analyzed them through the grounded theory for literature review approach. We identified five themes across the papers: the different research perspectives, the type of sports and sportspeople, the roles o...
Human-Computer Interaction researchers are increasingly designing technologies aimed at supporting “behavior change.” The model of change, which most of these works embrace, focuses on the idea that change occurs on the behavioral level and that it is externalistic, monistic, mechanistic, fragmented, and episodic. We think that a different take, fo...
In this paper we point out some relevant issues in relation to privacy when providing holistic recommendations. We emphasize that a holistic recommender should be fair, explainable and privacy-preserving to ensure the ethicality of the recommendation process. Further, we point out relevant research questions that should be addressed in the future,...
IoT enables the worldwide connection of heterogeneous things or objects, which can hence interact with each other and cooperate with their neighbors to reach common goals, by using different communication technologies and communication protocol standards. IoT and related technologies can increase or reduce the gap among people. In this respect, thi...
Designing an urban platform intended to be a shared virtual space for coordination, cooperation and collaboration among public administrations, local institutions, civic organizations, businesses, and citizens is an open challenge. This paper presents the current framework and applications of the civic social network FirstLife, developed following...
A smart organization is knowledge-driven, networked, and dynamically adaptive to new organizational forms and practices, as well as ready to create and exploit the opportunities offered by the digital age (Matheson & Matheson, 2001). However, smart organizations likely involve more than the capability of setting up and exploiting a digital infrastr...
Energy efficiency in buildings is a key issue in the current energy transition. In order to reduce building energy consumption, users’ behaviour and the perception of indoor environmental comfort must be taken into account; these aspects are inextricably linked to energy demand, consumption and related costs. In this paper, we present the methodolo...
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the UMAP 2019 Workshop on Explainable and Holisitic User Modeling (ExHUM). Our workshop took inspiration from the analysis of the recent Web dynamics: according to a recent claim by IBM, 90% of the data available today have been created in the last two years. Such an exponential growth of personal informat...
Over the years, the relationship between technology and people with autism has been framed mainly in a medical model, where technology is primarily aimed at mitigating deficits and providing helps to overcome limitations. This has yielded a variety of Human-Computer Interaction designs addressed to improve the autistic individuals’ daily tasks and...
Human-computer interaction is progressively shifting towards natural language communication, determining the rise of conversational agents. In the context of ubiquitous computing, the opportunities for interacting with new services and systems in a conversational manner are increasing and, nowadays, it is common to talk to home assistants to intera...
Human–computer interaction researchers are increasingly designing behaviour change technologies for a variety of purposes, from promoting healthier lifestyles to support sustainable habits. These technologies are commonly assessed in terms of their effectiveness in modifying human behaviour. Nevertheless, the multifaceted social and psychological l...
This paper presents a novel personalized service to support people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in their daily movements within urban environments. It aims at helping them in managing anxiety and stress originated by routine breakdowns and unfamiliar situations, improving their autonomy. In particular, we provide an interactive map that is i...
In this paper we introduce the concept of holistic recommendations, namely a set of suggestions generated by exploiting a more comprehensive representation of the user that relies on the personal information coming from different heterogeneous data sources (e.g., social networks, wristbands, smartphones, etc.) and considers the diverse relations an...
This paper presents a personalized interactive map aimed at supporting people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in their daily transfers within urban environments. To this end, it aims to model a "complete" representation of the ASD individual by merging a variety of information in a unique user model. Moreover, it exploits crowdsourcing mechanis...
Autoethnography is an ethnographic method in which a fieldworker’s experience is investigated together with the experience of other observed social actors. Over the years, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research almost exclusively produced “objective ethnographies”, attempting to generate accurate descriptions of the “world” and the individuals i...
Technological advances in wearable computing are changing the sports domain. A variety of Personal Informatics (PI) tools are starting to provide support and improve athletes’ performance in many sports. In this article, we interviewed 20 amateur and elite athletes of different disciplines, using an array of PI devices, to explore how sports, as we...
World of Warcraft (WoW) may be a source of inspiration to enrich the Personal Informatics systems user's experience and, at the same time, improve gamification design. Through the findings of a four-year reflexive ethnography in WoW, I outline how its game design elements support players in making sense of their own data, emphasizing how "game numb...
This course aims at introducing some key issues in contemporary ethnographic practice, emphasizing the role of the writing style and the epistemic position of the fieldworker in shaping a particular perspective on the observed phenomena. It outlines the theoretical assumptions that lie behind the traditional "realist position" of HCI ethnographies...
Despite the growing interest for gamification research within the Human–Computer interaction community, gamification techniques still suffer from a limited availability of game elements to be employed in design practices. Researchers and practitioners are anchored to the use of points, badges, and leaderboards, rarely introducing novel design solut...
Thanks to the advancements in ubiquitous and wearable technologies, Personal Informatics (PI) systems can now reach a larger audience of users. However, it is not still clear whether this kind of tool can fit the needs of their daily lives. Our research aims at identifying specific barriers that may prevent the widespread adoption of PI and finding...
In recent years, we witnessed the spreading of a plethora of wearable and mobile technologies allowing for a continuous and “transparent” gathering of personal data [...]
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the UMAP 2018 HUM (Holistic User Modeling) Workshop. According to a recent claim by IBM, 90% of the data available today have been created in the last two years. This exponential growth of online information has given new life to research in the area of user modeling and personalization, since information...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to expand the research of games as information systems. It illustrates how significant parts of massively multiplayer online role-playing function like information retrieval from a library database system.
Design/methodology/approach
By combining ideas from earlier contributions on the topics of game environmen...
In recent years, User Modeling (UM) scenery is changing. With the recent advancements in wearable and mobile technologies, the amount and type of data that can be gathered about users and employed to build User Models is rapidly expanding. UM can now be enriched with data regarding different aspects of people's daily lives and is likely to deliver...
On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-‐it conference seri...
Gamification has been attracted much interest, not only in the HCI community, in the last few years. However, there is still a lack of insights and theory on the relationships between game design elements, motivation, domain context and user behavior. In this workshop we want to discover the potentials of data-driven gamification design optimizatio...
Quantified Self (QS) field needs to start thinking of how situated needs may affect the use of self-tracking technologies. In this workshop we will focus on the idiosyncrasies of specific categories of users.
This paper presents an ongoing project, PIUMA, Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Autism, with the aim to help people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) move and live within cities.
This paper presents the preliminary results of PIUMA project, Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Autism, which aims at tracking personal movements of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to support them in their everyday life.
Human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers are increasingly designing technologies for behavior change, drawing on different perspectives, theories and models. In recent years, a new approach has started to be explored within the HCI community: gamification is more and more used by researchers and designers to drive users' behaviors toward specif...
Consumption practices show a strong presence of crystallised social understandings, organising rules and permanent ways of acting that prevent individuals from changing towards more sustainable habits. Over the years, human–computer interaction research tried to help people engage in sustainable lifestyles promoting the health of the Earth. However...
The importance of user modeling and personalization is taken for granted in several scenarios. According to this widespread paradigm, each user can be modeled through some (explicitly or implicitly gathered) information about her knowledge or about her preferences, in order to adapt the behavior of a generic intelligent system to her specific chara...
This research has the aim to find new meaningful elements, in the video game world, that could inspire the design of novel gamified systems. Starting from the players’ point of view, I looked at the field of the Massively Multi Player Online Role-Playing Games as a source of inspiration, conducting an ethnographic study in World of Warcraft. Thus,...
This paper outlines the roadmap and the preliminary results of an interactive systems aimed at providing interactive urban maps tailored to people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It aims at involving ASDs in the design process to produce personalized services that can support their daily movements and task management, improving their autonomy...
Background. Gamification commonly uses a limited set of design elements to enhance applications and services in a variety of contexts, such as learning, health and work. However, gamification techniques are based on well-established design practices and rarely new game elements are added to the catalogue available to gamification designers.
Aim. Th...
Although Personal Informatics stresses the importance of “self”-awareness and “self”-knowledge in collecting personal data, a description of the “self”, to which all these knowledge endeavors are addressed, is missing in the current debate. In this article we first review how the different theoretical assumptions that currently inform the design of...
Gamification has been widely accepted in the HCI community in the last few years. However, the current debate is focused on its short-term consequences, such as effectiveness and usefulness, while its side-effects, long-term criticalities and systemic impacts are rarely raised. This workshop will explore the gamification design space from a critica...
Gamification design still lacks of a catalogue of game design elements defined on the basis of the players' experience, rather than of the game designers' expertise. In this work I outline an ongoing project that tries to define a catalogue of game elements for the gamification domain starting from the players' perspective. By investigating how Wor...
This paper tackles an important issue of how to use semantic web technologies for Quantified Self (QS). Ontologies offer a great opportunity for data integration and reasoning over data in a QS environment.
While the Quantified Self (QS) community is described in terms of "self-knowledge through numbers" people are increasingly demanding value and meaning. In this workshop we aim at refocusing the QS debate on the value of data for providing new services.