Carmelo Ardito

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Polytechnic University of Bari

Brain age, a biomarker reflecting brain health relative to chronological age, is increasingly used in neuroimaging to detect early signs of neurodegenerative diseases and support personalized treatment plans. Two primary approaches for brain age prediction have emerged: morphometric feature extraction from MRI scans and deep learning (DL) applied t...

The realm of music composition, augmented by technological advancements such as computers and related equipment, has undergone significant evolution since the 1970s. In the field algorithmic composition, however, the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) in sound generation and combination has been limited. Existing approaches predominantly...

Phishing, the deceptive act of stealing personal and sensitive information by sending messages that seem to come from trusted entities, is one of the most widespread and effective cyberattacks. Automated defensive techniques against these attacks have been widely investigated. These solutions often exploit AI-based systems that, when a suspect webs...

In smart electrical grids, fault detection tasks may have a high impact on society due to their economic and critical implications. In the recent years, numerous smart grid applications, such as defect detection and load forecasting, have embraced data-driven methodologies. The purpose of this study is to investigate the challenges associated with...

Due to their economic and significant importance, fault detection tasks in intelligent electrical grids are vital. Although numerous smart grid (SG) applications, such as fault detection and load forecasting, have adopted data-driven approaches, the robustness and security of these data-driven algorithms have not been widely examined. One of the gr...

In smart electrical grids, fault detection tasks may have a high impact on society due to their economic and critical implications. In the recent years, numerous smart grid applications, such as defect detection and load forecasting, have embraced data-driven methodologies. The purpose of this study is to investigate the challenges associated with...

Due to their economic and significant importance, fault detection tasks in intelligent electrical grids (fault detection, fault type, and fault location classifications) are vital. Although numerous smart grid (SG) applications, such as fault detection and load forecasting, have adopted data-driven approaches, the robustness and security of these d...

In electrical grids, fault diagnosis (fault type and fault location classifications) are critical due to their economic and important implications. Numerous smart grid applications have embraced data-driven methodologies. While the majority of the work in this topic has been on increasing the predicted accuracy of machine-learning model for fault d...

Phishing, the deceptive act of stealing personal and sensitive information by sending messages that seem to come from trusted entities, is one of the most widespread and effective cyberattacks. Automated defensive techniques against these attacks have been widely investigated. These solutions often exploit AI-based systems that, when a suspect webs...

Brain Computer Interfaces can enable engaging interactions between different art forms such as music, dance, painting. Building on this, we present a demo of a biofeedback system: a dancer wearing a NeuroSky headset adapts her performance according to the music she listens to. The same music has been generated by a music-composition software depend...

This paper reports ongoing research for the definition of a data-driven self-healing system using machine learning (ML) techniques that can perform automatic and timely detection of fault types and locations. Specifically, the proposed method makes use of spectrogram-based CNN modeling of the 3-phase voltage signals. Furthermore, to keep human oper...

New and evolving threats emerge every day in the e-Health industry. The safety of e-Health’s telemonitoring systems is becoming a prominent task. In this work, starting from a CADS (Cyberattack Detection System) model that uses artificial intelligence techniques to detect anomalies, we focus on the activity of interacting with data. Using a User In...

Several mitigation strategies in form of warning messages against phishing attacks have continued to fail largely due to user negligence. Thus, it is important for researchers to focus not only on the accuracy of the provided recommendations but also on other factors that influence the acceptance of recommendations and the extent to which these rec...

In the Brain Computer Interface domain, studies on EEG represent a huge field of interest. Interactive systems that exploit low cost electroencephalographs to control machines are gaining momentum. Such technologies can be useful in the field of music and assisted composition. In this paper, a system that aims to generate four-part polyphonies is p...

Remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to be the new normal, suggesting a situation where people use their personal computers at home for several activities like reading emails, surfing the web, chatting with friends. While doing this, users are not focused on securing their systems and they often do not have the skills and knowledge...

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has brought unexpected new scenarios in patient-care journeys and has accelerated this innovative process in the healthcare sector, demonstrating the importance of a systemic rethinking of remote care, mostly when patients are discharged from the hospital and continue their therapies at home in autonomy. The possibility to r...

In the e-Health domain, new and continuously evolving threats emerge every day. The security of e-Health telemonitoring systems is no longer negligible. In this paper, we propose a Cyberattack Detection System (CADS) model that exploits artificial intelligence techniques to detect anomalies without requiring a security analyst, explain the maliciou...

This work revisits security threats on smart electrical grids and focuses on the dimensions of dependability, serviceability, and accountability, which constitute the security requirements of an SG application. The first two dimensions deal with fault diagnosis and location, while the last element tackles building the system more transparent. We pr...

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...

Internet of Things (IoT), and in general the Internet of Everything (IoE), are deeply influencing the business processes Digital Transformation, also in the Public Administration context, introducing new actors and interactions among People, Process, Data and Things. Therefore, a re-design of the processes or the creation of new ones is necessary,...

A Smart Grid (SG) develops a suited environment for improving the reliability of traditional electrical gird. By considering graph modeling and computing, this paper proposes a set of criteria for computing a cost function for each node in the grid, which is important information to be injected into a self-healing system to improve defensive mechan...

One of the main challenges of Cultural Heritage is to enhance the visit to ancient ruins, in which what remains is difficult to interpret. For this reason, we designed an interactive narrative by making use of tangible devices to improve the experience of wandering around the ruins of Egnatia (Fasano, Brindisi, Italy). We tried to evoke the "Genius...

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) promotes the assistance of a patient at home according to her/his Clinical Pathway, i.e., a set of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures related to the treatment of that specific patient. AAL is increasingly gaining momentum thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT). Edge-Computing would boost the AAL success, since this...

Automatic fault type classification is an important ingredient of smart electrical grids. Similar to other machine-learning models, methods developed for fault classification suffer from the issue of lack of transparency. This work sheds light on preliminary insights of an ongoing study, in which we show how feature importance measurement and featu...

Integrated clinical pathways (ICPs) are task-oriented care plans detailing the essential steps of the therapeutic pathway referring to a specific clinical problem with a patient’s expected clinical course. ICPs represent an effective tool for resource management in the public and private health domains. To be automatically executed, the ICP process...

Cultural Heritage can use ICT and game design to provide compelling experiences of visiting ancient ruins. In fact, archaeological sites benefit from being enriched with additional meanings that help visitors to contextualize what they see. For example, young tourists when accessing cities of the past could miss the chance of really appreciating th...

Most phishing sites are simply copies of real sites with slight features distorted or in some cases masqueraded. This property of phishing sites has made them difficult for humans and various anti-phishing techniques to detect. Also, the attacker community has proved itself able to quickly adapt to anti-phishing measures, mainly warning messages to...

In the present paper we introduce an activity involving twenty elementary school children aimed at increasing their awareness towards the importance of reusing waste materials. Once that target is achieved, we facilitate children’s purposeful construction of diegetic artefacts and imaginary robots that have environmental purposes. The main goal of...

This paper describes the first edition of the Human-Centered Cybersecurity workshop, held in conjunction with CHItaly 2019. Cyber attacks have been increasing in the recent years. Although users have been identified as one of the major security weaknesses in today's technologies, many cyber-attack preventions focus on systems and technology without...

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...

The widespread introduction of the Internet of Things into people’s daily lives calls for approaches that allow even unskilled end users to autonomously configure their own smart environments. Various tools, either research or commercial, are available, which allow end users to combine smart objects and services for creating applications that meet...

The present case study describes and comments on an experimental activity with 9-11 year old children of a public school in Lecce (Italy) in August 2018. The pupils were required to create computational tools using materials recycled from their own home. We adopted a constructionist perspective; we wanted to foster reflection and discussion among t...

Aging population is a global concern, but the situation is even worst in developing countries where the migration of the active population from rural areas to major cities makes the elderly left in their home in the village, usually assisted by close relatives who take care of them. Far distance to accessing good health facilities provided in the c...

Internet of Things (IoT) is now pervasive in most business and Public Administration processes. Along with the dizzying development of technological solutions, in recent years new methodological approaches are emerging with the objective of abstracting IoT functionalities, in order to manage them as resources in project management methodologies. A...

In Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), Internet of Things (IoT) technology is exploited to equip living environments with smart objects that communicate with the outside world in an intelligent and goal-oriented manner and can support the occupants’ activities. Currently, providing such objects with new capabilities requires several programming efforts....

Significant challenges will have to be overcome to achieve the level of agricultural productivity necessary to meet the predicted world demand for food, feed, fiber, and fuel in 2050. Although agriculture has met significant chal¬lenges in the past, targeted increases in productivity will have to be made by 2050, in the face of stringent constraint...

We propose to create a system that, by exploiting the possibilities provided by the Internet of Things (IoT), offers a cheap and affordable solution to prevent and control health problems of people, especially elderly, living in rural villages, where assessing good health facilities is a major concern. The system consists of a heterogeneous combina...

We present the activity of strolling as an artistic practice. With this we make an invitation to be lost in the geography of an urban setting. The main concept is to provide the physical space with a communication level that would be pleasant to discover while wandering without a destination. We want to support flânerie as way for recapturing the d...

The collaborative decision-making process is traditionally supported by multi-user interfaces, such as large multi-touch screens or interactive tabletops for accessing, relating and comparing different data sources. Since such multi-user interfaces are typically expensive and unavailable outside dedicated environments (e.g. labs, smart rooms), rece...

Over the years, interaction design has become increasingly complex due to the evolution of end users of interactive systems. Approaches such as user-centered design (UCD), which proved effective in the creation of usable interactive systems, have to deal with this evolution. As HCI researchers working at the design of interactive systems in several...

Domain specificity is largely recognized as a means to foster the adoption of systems by specific communities of non-technical users. This paper presents an architecture for the development of Task-Automation Systems that can be customized in specific domains. It is one of the results of a human-centred design process we performed to support non-te...

The growing availability of smart objects is stimulating researchers to investigate the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon from different perspectives. The potential of this technology is evident in different domains. In Cultural Heritage (CH), it may enhance access to CH collections, in order to ensure a more engaging visit experience and to incr...

Usability is central especially in contexts with highly heterogeneous user groups as it is the case in developing countries. User involvement and participation has positive impacts towards developing usable software and system success and it is one of the core principles in user centered design (UCD). But how does the industry in developing countri...

Meta-design has been proposed as a model to design systems able to support End-User Development (EUD). Meta-design means “design for designers.” Differently than in traditional design, professional developers do not directly create a final application, but they build software environments thorough which non-technical end users, acting as co-designe...

Developing interactive systems to access and manipulate data is a very tough task. In particular, the development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most time-consuming activities in the software lifecycle. This is even more demanding when data have to be retrieved by accessing flexibly different online resources. Indeed, software development i...

This demo presents a platform for the definition of IoT-enhanced visits to Cultural Heritage (CH) sites. The platform is characterized by an End-User Development paradigm applied to the Internet of Things technologies and customized for the CH domain. It allows different stakeholders to configure the behavior of smart objects in order to create mor...

The growing availability of smart objects is stimulating researchers in investigating the IoT phenomenon from different perspectives. In the HCI area, and in particular from the EUD perspective, one prominent goal is to enable non-technical users to be directly involved in configuring smart object behaviour. With this respect, this paper discusses...

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is central for economic development; and usability is central for the functioning of ICT especially in context with highly heterogeneous user groups like developing countries. But how does industry in developing countries work with usability and usability evaluation? The paper reports from a survey on...

Research on the Internet of Things (IoT) has devoted many efforts to technological aspects. Little social and practical benefits have emerged so far. IoT devices, so-called smart objects, are becoming even more pervasive and social, leading to the need to provide non-technical users with innovative interaction strategies for controlling their behav...

This paper illustrates a composition paradigm and a related tool to express rules for smart object composition. The composition paradigm is characterized by operators for coupling multiple events and conditions exposed by smart objects, and for defining temporal and spatial constraints on rule activation. The design of the composition paradigm is b...

The integration of Human-Centred Design (HCD) and Agile software development approaches is gaining momentum in both the Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering communities. The common principles shared by the two approaches, i.e., iterative design, user involvement, continuous testing and prototyping, should facilitate their integration...

Information and communication technologies have a great potential to enhance personal experience in cultural heritage sites. Our research in the Cultural Heritage (CH) aims to foster a wider appreciation of archaeology by offering tools able to engage the general public and to increase awareness of the importance of CH. In this paper we discuss how...

The EFESTO platform allows the creation of interactive workspaces supporting end users in the exploration and seamless composition of heterogeneous data sources. By means of a visual paradigm implemented within a Web composition environment, the end users dynamically create "live" mashups where relevant information, extracted from different types o...

Recent technology advances support the interconnection of smart objects, enabling their communication according to the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. IoT is promising important changes in our lives. The opportunities offered by such technologies can be amplified, by investigating new approaches that, thanks to high-level abstractions, can enabl...

Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are distributed and dynamic software environments that foster the collaboration of people from different disciplines by supporting the accomplishment of complex research tasks. VREs lack efficient and effective user interfaces able to satisfy the needs of the different types of people collaborating in performing...

Every day companies deal with internal problems in order to manage human resources during the execution of business processes. The ability to quickly identify and rapidly apply effective business practices to recurring problems becomes crucial in order to improve the efficiency of the organization. To seize the opportunity of adapting their busines...

Abstract Collaboration is acknowledged as a key element of learning. Thus, it is valuable to develop Information and Communication Technology applications that, implemented on proper devices, can support collaborative learning. Large multi-touch displays appear to encourage collaboration by offering users a shared environment to act upon. However,...

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) discipline is taught in almost all the Computer Science curricula, whose students are typically attracted by computer technologies and inclined to consider the study of user interaction factors less valued. The aim of this workshop is to bring together HCI teachers and practitioners to discuss how to improve quality...

This paper illustrates EFESTO, a mashup platform designed to enable end users to explore information by creating interactive workspaces. Within a Web composition environment, end users dynamically create “live mashups” where relevant information, extracted from heterogeneous data sources - including the Linked Open Data – is integrated according to...

This paper describes how to involve end users without expertise in programming in a session where they will be asked to accomplish some tasks according to a new paradigm for actionable mashups. The goal will be to under-stand what the advantages of this new paradigm are with respect to traditional methods for mashup composition and information expl...

This paper discusses motivations and requirements leading to elastic environments where relevant information and the functions that can be performed on it can be shaped by end users at runtime. As a solution for creating elastic environments, a framework is presented which exploits methods for the mashup of heterogeneous resources and elastic featu...

Download the paper for free from http://ivu.di.uniba.it/people/desolda.htm#Pubblicazioni (find the paper in the Journal section and click on the blue icon on the right side of the paper) ABSTRACT: Large interactive displays are increasingly placed in public (or semipublic) locations, including museums, shops, various city settings, and offices. Th...

The huge amount of heterogeneous content available nowadays on the Web pushes towards approaches and tools to allow people, even non-technical ones, to retrieve, combine and manipulate such content, in order to satisfy their knowledge needs. In this paper we illustrate how composition technologies enable teacher and students to create, use and shar...

INTERACT is among the world’s top conferences in Human-Computer Interaction. Starting with the first INTERACT conference in 1990, this conference series has been organised under the aegis of the Technical Committee 13 on Human-Computer Interaction of the UNESCO International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). This committee aims at devel...

INTERACT is among the world’s top conferences in Human-Computer Interaction. Starting with the first INTERACT conference in 1990, this conference series has been organised under the aegis of the Technical Committee 13 on Human-Computer Interaction of the UNESCO International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). This committee aims at devel...

Distributed Interactive Workspaces (DIWs) are interactive environments, accessible through different devices, where end users create new content by exploring and aggregating data retrieved from distributed resources in the Web, tailor this content to their own personal needs, use it on different devices, and possibly share and co-create it with oth...

Integration of human-centered design in a company's software development practice requires a thorough analysis of its current practices by both researchers and practitioners.

Recent advances in computing devices push researchers to envision new interaction modalities that go beyond traditional mouse and keyboard input. Typical examples are large displays for which researchers hope to create more "natural" means of interaction by using human gestures and body movements as input. In this article, we reflect about this goa...

Objective The overall objective of the research work presented in this article is to investigate models, methods and architectures to replace fixed, pre-packaged applications with flexible composition environments that make interactive environments “emerge” at run-time, based on composition actions performed by non-technical users. The approach aim...

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study whose main aim is to verify if the Pattern-Based (PB) inspection technique enables end users to perform reliable evaluation of e-learning systems in real work-related settings. The study involved 13 Polish and Italian participants, who did not have an HCI background, but used e-learning platfo...

There is a huge and ever increasing amount of data sources available on the Web, which provide content through programmatic interfaces. Unfortunately, such data sources are accessible only through programming and therefore it is difficult for non-technical users to take advantage of such enormous data assets. The need therefore arises for paradigms...

The availability of different methods (and models) that support the design and evaluation of interactive systems raises a question about the transferability of such methods between application sectors and domains. The transferability refers to the selection and application of a method in a development context, qualifying it for the interactive syst...

Every day companies deal with internal problems in order to manage human resources during the execution of business processes. The ability to quickly identify and rapidly apply effective business practices to recurring problems becomes crucial in order to improve the efficiency of the organization. To seize the opportunity of adapting their busines...

A current trend in the design of modern interactive systems is to let people create new value by integrating heterogeneous resources to fit their contextual needs. In this paper, we briefly illustrate our approach for the lightweight integration of service-based and situational work-spaces, pervasively accessible and sharable through a variety of d...

The revolutionary advances of Information and Communication Technology push towards the evolution of end users from passive information consumers to information producers. In many contexts, end users are increasingly willing to manipulate content they get from various resources in the Web, move it across the boundaries of their original application...

The importance of adopting usability engineering methods in software development is eventually recognized by an increasing number of companies. However, several studies show that, in spite of the declared awareness of usability as an important software quality and the benefits reported in the literature, many companies still neglect in their develo...

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 Sof...

This paper illustrates our approach to enhance the visit experience of archeological parks. It exploits composition technologies, End-User Development and participatory design approaches, in order to allow different stakeholders to create, use and share Personal Information Spaces. Heterogeneous content can be combined and manipulated to satisfy di...