Costas Mourlas

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens | uoa · Faculty of Communication and Mass Media Studies

With the advent of the COVID pandemic, newspapers and news websites witnessed a remarkable increase in the use of the Greek translation loan for coronavirus. The newly rediscovered word appeared in four main variants (κορονοϊός, κορωνοϊός, κοροναϊός, κορωναϊός), while several metalinguistic texts prescribing the one or the other variant were also p...

This paper presents the results of the investigation on the impact of images on both the quality of news content and its engagement, with a focus on both highbrow and tabloid news organizations. Since visual media are easier to remember than words and can attract the readers’ attention, they play a significant role in what content online readers de...

Purpose This research aims to analyze the role of visuals posted on the social media of NGOs and to predict the popularity of a post based on the characteristics of the visual it contains. Design/methodology/approach Two social media platforms, namely Facebook and Instagram, were selected as the empirical study environments. Specifically, all visu...

This paper delineates the preliminary outcomes of the “IQ Journalism” project, which endeavors to develop an intelligent agent tailored for journalistic articles. By harnessing the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence methodologies, the proposed advisor is designed to provide journalists and editors with real-time suggestions to enhance audience...

This paper presents the preliminary outputs of the EU project CALYPSO which aims to create a crowdsourcing ecosystem for citizens to volunteer to combat disinformation campaigns by participating in a game for good. CALYPSO seeks to enhance fact-checking through the participation of different actors with different levels of responsibilities and priv...

This paper examines the notions of neoliberalism and the financialization and marketisation of public life by using computational tools such as sentence embeddings on a novel corpus of neoliberal articles. More specifically, we experimented with distributional semantics along with several Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and machine lea...

This article aims to explain the perceived quality of online news articles. Discovering which elements of a news story influence readers’ perceptions could drive online popularity, which is the paramount factor of digital news readership. This work explores an approach to use tree-based machine learning algorithms to address this problem based on s...

Societies across the globe suffer from the effects of disinformation campaigns creating an urgent need for a way of tracking falsehoods before they become widely spread. Although building a detection tool for online disinformation campaigns is a challenging task, this paper attempts to approach this problem by examining content-based features relat...

Does Europe live in a populist zeitgeist? Why would mainstream European parties become more populist in recent years? Some scholars argue that the expansion of right-wing populism in Europe points to the global economic crisis which has left undeniable consequences on a European scale. Others believe that the reducing ideological distinctiveness of...

Uncovering their readers’ perceptions is of key importance for every news media organization to find methods to improve the quality of their product. It has the potential to facilitate journalists’ work in attracting attention and gaining a loyal audience. Discovering which elements of a news story influence readers’ perceptions has been a cross-di...

Does Europe live in a populist zeitgeist? Why would mainstream European parties become more populist in recent years? Some scholars argue that the expansion of right-wing populism in Europe points to the global economic crisis which has left undeniable consequences on a European scale. Others believe that the reducing ideological distinctiveness of...

The current era of advanced computational mobile systems, continuous connectivity and multi-variate data has led to the deployment of rich information settings that generate constant and close to real-time feedback. Journalists and authors of articles in the area of Data Journalism have only recently acknowledged the influence that the audience rea...

Nowadays, the role of the computer and the Internet has been upgraded in the lives of people, witnessing a paradigm shift on how users communicate with each other or with their service providers. Main characteristics of this reality include dynamic strategies and conditions, multivariate random interactions with instant feedback, and holistic activ...

Inferences of physiological responses are seen increasingly in dynamically adaptive environments, towards personalization, learning, and interactive instructional design. In search of conclusive interpretations, scientists consider bio-sensing and physiological metrics in addition to formal assessment methodologies. Devices developed for laboratory...

Gamification is a well known approach nowadays for achieving the ultimate goal of motivating loyalty with a brand and engaging users with given tasks in a variety of fields. However, attempts made to use gamification techniques in news industry have given poor results, pointing to the conclusion that journalism may not an open field for gamificatio...

Changes in news consumption across the globe show a rapid rise of news audiences accessing stories through their mobile devices, while social media play a huge role in distribution of online news. This paper examines a gamification approach for achieving the ultimate goal of engaging users with a social News Reader application that combines smartph...

The paper examines how a gamification approach can enhance and enrich the learning experience of personal care givers (PCGs) for people with disabilities and older people (potential or in active employment). Using game elements that pervade the M-Care mobile PCG training application, users are given the opportunity to self-assess their newly acquir...

The purpose of special education for students with intellectual disability is not only to introduce and improve academic skills but mainly to enhance the quality of the children's life and promote their autonomy and self-determination. Games have been used in special education classrooms as tools of gratification and extrinsic motivation. Contempor...

In a one year old study, students with mild and moderate intellectual disability, used serious games in their educational practice. Communication, interaction, participation and motivation have been documented in a qualitative study using two different classrooms as case studies. In this paper we describe the documented process of these endeavors,...

Games have made their appearance in various articles in the popular press as a prominent educational tool, however teachers do not seem confident enough to include them in their educational scenarios, despite their need for high quality content and motivational tools. Digital games have been documented in the literature review as a promising educat...

Developing a usable checkout process is pivotal for e-business success. However, recent research has shown that users frequently abandon their shopping carts and lacking a clear direction through the process. In this context, aiming to improve the usability and overall user experience of checkout processes in ecommerce Web-sites, this paper reports...

Human emotion is a psycho-physiological state in most cases not obvious to the subject. Different permutations of emotional constituents sometimes cause similar outward expressions; therefore facial expression methods cannot achieve reliable estimates. Sensing physiological manifestations of hormonal and neural stimulations instigated by emotion an...

The aim of the present study is to develop a model that grasps the complexity of the concepts of personality and affect in a web-based learning environment. Furthermore, it presents the implications that these theoretical and empirical representations can have in an experimental setting. We are investigating the connection between personality facto...

The purpose of this paper is to present a series of observations made by researchers and educators on the integration of serious games in the educational experience of users with intellectual disabilities (ID). Data were gathered from four different studies and different games were used, in order to identify a successful model of games based learni...

RouteMate is an accessible location based mobile and web application, designed and developed in order to assist people with various disabilities learn simple routes. Methodology was supported by structuring the software using principles of game based learning, in order to scaffold the learning of new routes and promote independent travel. In this p...

The attention to learners with special needs, in particular those with intellectual disabilities, is an area of continuous development. It is considered important to develop adaptive educational solutions for the integration of people with educational difficulties according to their needs. Digital games provide an attractive and direct platform in...

The challenges in the development of a system performing real time detection of physiological parameters are fundamentally aversive because of the incommodities caused by the wires and sensing attachments onto the user, making the measurement sessions uncomfortable. Another factor is that the sensing accessories influence the plausibility of the me...

This article discusses the potential role of cognitive individual differ-ences in the context of designing ontologies for personalization on users' characte-ristics. The theoretical framework of the proposed approach is derived from the long tradition of psychometric testing, incorporating implications from the field of differential and cognitive p...

Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) related applications tend to be a trend for most successful businesses, organizations and domains nowadays, as is the Healthcare sector. Healthcare specialists often work in remote areas facing many problems and challenges driven mainly from the limitations and constraints of the mobile and wireless tech...

The attention to learners with special needs, in particular those with intellectual disabilities, is an area of continuous development. It is considered important to develop adaptive educational solutions for the integration of people with educational difficulties according to their needs. Digital games provide an attractive and direct platform in...

The basic objective of this paper is to make an extensive reference of a combination of concepts and techniques coming from different research areas, Psychology and Web personalization technologies, both of which focus upon the user. It has been attempted to approach the theoretical considerations and technological parameters that can provide the m...

The purpose of this communication is to present a series of observations made by researchers and educators on the incorporation of serious games in the educational experience of users with intellectual disabilities.

The challenges in the development of a system performing real time detection of physiological parameters are fundamentally aversive because of the incommodities caused by the wires and sensing attachments onto the user, making the measurement sessions uncomfortable. Another factor is that the sensing accessories influence the plausibility of the me...

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the usage of serious games as a motivational medium at the educational experience of users with intellectual disabilities on one hand, and their educator on the other.Digital games have been reported to stimulate the students’ interest, while motivating them to deploy control, curiosity, and imagination...

Adaptation and Personalization systems can benefit with the incorporation of ontological knowledge, especially when it comes to modeling users. In this paper we present a cognitive approach to Web Personalization based on an ontology that contains users' cognitive factors. Accordingly, a human factors' ontology has been designed and developed using...

This paper presents the findings of a preliminary study about the use of bio-feedback sensors in the context of an educational hypermedia environment, skin conductance, blood volume pulse and heart rate physiological data were gathered. The aim of the study was to examine learners' emotional arousal variability, and possible correlations of the phy...

For many years people have been trying to measure differences between individuals. Over the course of time, a combination of developments in statistical know-how and the evolution of thought within psychology enabled the refinement of measures, and subsequently the assessment of more specific factors in the field of individual differences like diff...

This research paper presents the positive effect of incorporating individuals’ working memory (WM) span as a personalization factor in terms of improving users’ academic performance in the context of adaptive educational hypermedia. The psychological construct of WM is robustly related to information processing and learning, while there is a wide d...

The research described in this paper focuses on adapting generic Hypermedia Environments with the use of Semantic Web technologies. The use of machine understandable semantics in Web applications is increasing significantly, ranging from semantic search queries to personalized product recommendations. Given the significance of human factors in Web...

This paper introduces a new model of personalized usage of the internet that is based on technologies of user representation, artificial intelligence and semantic augmentation of the content. By taking advantage of internet's unprecedented dynamics, compared to traditional media, this user representation model incorporates cognitive, mainly, psycho...

Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) related applications tend to be a trend for most successful businesses, organizations and domains nowadays, as is the Healthcare sector. Healthcare specialists often work in remote areas facing many problems and challenges driven mainly from the limitations and constraints of the mobile and wireless tech...

Advances in wireless communications and information technology have made the Mobile Web a reality. The Mobile Web is the response to the need for anytime, anywhere access to information and services. Many wireless applications have already been deployed and are available to customers via their mobile phones and wirelessly-connected PDAs. However, a...

The notion of context in context-aware applications is not merely an issue of external situational circumstances or device/channel properties, but it could also refer to a wide array of user characteristics that have an effect throughout users’ interactions with a system. Human factors such as cognitive traits and current state, from a psychologica...

The knowledge management paradigm of communities of practice can be efficiently realized in Web-based environments, especially if one considers the extended social networks that have proliferated within the Internet. In terms of increasing performance through the exchange of knowledge and shared learning, individual characteristics, such as learner...

Advances in wireless communications and information technology have made the Mobile Web a reality. The Mobile Web is the response to the need for anytime, anywhere access to information and services. Many wireless applications have already been deployed and are available to customers via their mobile phones and wirelessly-connected PDAs. However, a...

Advances in wireless communications and information technology have made the Mobile Web a reality. The Mobile Web is the response to the need for anytime, anywhere access to information and services. Many wireless applications have already been deployed and are available to customers via their mobile phones and wirelessly-connected PDAs. However, a...

Today’s information age is accelerating at quantum speed. Advances, such as the Internet and high-speed networks, have propelled the never-ending quest for information. In this regard, eHealth services is a continuously growing sector, driving the need for advances in the dynamic working environment of different medical actors promoting the effecti...

Challenges today in the Web personalization and adaptation research area range from heterogeneous user needs and user environment issues such as current location and time to multi-channel delivery of applications concerning Web-based content related to services, educational multimedia, entertainment, commerce, etc. Nowadays, most Web personalizatio...

Researchers used to believe that emotional processes are beyond the scope of a scientific study. Recent advances in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, however, suggest that there is nothing mystical about emotional processes. Affective neuroscience and psychology have reported that human affect and emotional experience play a significan...

In order to assess the positive effect and validity of personalization on the basis of users' cognitive and emotional characteristics, this study presents three subsequent experiments. The first experiment explores the relationship of cognitive style and users' eye gaze behavior as to validate this specific psychological construct in the context of...

Eye-tracking measurements may be used as a method of identifying userspsila actual behavior in a hypermedia setting. In this research, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted in order to validate the construct of cognitive style as a personalization parameter in adaptive e-Learning systems. The main research question was whether the verbalizer/ima...

Research on modelling affect and on interfaces adaptation based on affective factors has matured considerably over the past several years. Emotions are considered to play a central role in guiding and regulating learning, performance, behaviour and decision making, by modulating numerous cognitive and physiological activities. The basic objective o...

Working memory (WM) is a psychological construct that has a major effect on information processing, thus signifying its importance when considering individual differences and adaptive educational hypermedia. Previous work of the authors in the field has demonstrated that personalization on human factors, including the WM sub-component of visuospati...

Mass customization should be more than just configuring a specific component (hardware or software), but should be seen as the co-design of an entire system, including services, experiences and human satisfaction at the individual as well as at the community level. The main objective of this paper is to introduce a framework for the automatic recon...

The research that is described in this paper focuses on incorporating theories of individual differences in information processing within the context of generic Hypertext and Hypermedia Environments. The main objective of this paper is to introduce a framework for the automatic reconstruction of Web content based on human factors. It is supported t...

The notion of context in context-aware applications is not merely an issue of external situational circumstances or device/channel properties, but it could also refer to a wide array of user characteristics that have an effect throughout users' interactions with a system. Human factors such as cognitive traits and current state, from a psychologica...

The purpose of this chapter is to experimentally explore the effect of individual differences in an adaptive educational hypermedia application. To that direction, the constructs of cognitive style (Cognitive Style Analysis) and visual working memory (visuo-spatial subsystem of Baddeley's model) were employed as personalization parameters, thus ren...

Mass customization should be more than just configuring a specific component (hardware or software), but should be seen as the co-design of an entire system, including services, experiences and human satisfaction at the individual as well as at the community level. The main objective of this chapter is to introduce a framework, smartTag, for the dy...

Mass customization and personalization are widely appreciated as viable and promising strategies which aim to provide products and services that best serve individuals' personal needs with near mass production efficiency. Mass Customization for Personalized Communication Environments: Integrating Human Factors focuses on the customization of servic...

A preliminary classification of individual characteristics that affect the outcome of learning procedures is the distinction between cognitive and emotional parameters. This covers a wide spectrum of human factors and comprises a very important research area in Web-based learning. Cognitive and Emotional Processes in Web-Based Education: Integratin...

Everyday hundreds of millions of users turn to the World-Wide Web as their primary source of information during their educational, business and personal lives. The Web is an essential source of business-critical information but has also changed our personal lives, influencing the way that we learn, play, shop and socialise. During the course of a t...

Web-based learning environments have become an integral part of learning. The way that they are employed in the learning process, or in other words the learning strategy followed in that respect, is an important issue that has to be carefully thought of, deciding upon topics such as suitable pedagogical approaches and appropriate assessment techniq...

Advances in wireless communications and information technology have made the Mobile Web a reality. The Mobile Web is the response to the need for anytime, anywhere access to information and services. Many wireless applications have already been deployed and are available to customers via their mobile phones and wirelessly-connected PDAs. However, a...

Collaborative learning has long been proven to be an effective approach in the traditional classroom setting. Despite the discussion of the benefits and potential of collaborative learning in a Web-based learning environment, there has been a lack of empirical studies showing whether and how distance learning students may benefit from this learning...

Adapting to user context, individual features and behavior patterns is a topic of great attention nowadays in the field of Web-based and mobile mediated platforms, such as eTraining, eCommerce, eLearning and so on. A challenge is to design an expressive ontology that is composed of human factors that can be used in any application, whether that is...

Individual differences in information processing, as derived from an approach that takes into account cognitive and emotional parameters, serve as a basis for setting a theoretical framework that addresses user profiling issues in web environments. This paper presents empirical results of two distinct efforts to built and evaluate personalized appl...

In order to clarify whether extending learners’ profiles in an adaptive educational system to cognitive and emotional characteristics may have a positive effect on performance, we conducted an empirical study that consists of two subsequent experiments. The human factors that were taken into consideration in the personalization process were cogniti...

Advances in Web-based oriented technologies and services are taking place with a considerable speed around the world. As communications and IT usage become an integral part of many people’s lives and the available products and services become more varied and sophisticated, users expect to be able to personalize a service to meet their individual ne...

A traditional system presents the same static explanation and suggests the same next page to all users, even though they might have widely differing knowledge of the subject. Such a system suffers from an inability to be all things to all people, especially when the user population is relatively diverse; users often lose sight of the goal of their...

A traditional multimedia system presents the same static content and suggests the same next page to all users, even though they might have widely differing knowledge of the subject. Such a system suffers from an inability to be all things to all people, especially when the user population is relatively diverse. The rapid growth of mobile and wirele...

Adapting to user context, individual features and behaviour patterns is a topic of great attention nowadays in the field of Web-based and mobile learning. A challenge is to design personalized interfaces and software enabling easy access to the learning content while being sufficiently flexible to handle changes in a user's context, perception and...

Advances in wireless communications and information technology have made the Mobile Web a reality. The Mobile Web is the response to the need for anytime, anywhere access to information and services. Many wireless applications have already been deployed and are available to customers via their mobile phones and wirelessly-connected PDAs. However, a...

Research on modelling affect and on interfaces adaptation based on affective factors has matured considerably over the past several years, so that designers of educational products are now considering the inclusion of components that take affect into account. Emotions are considered to play a central role in guiding and regulating behaviour by modu...

A traditional multimedia system presents the same static content and suggests the same next page to all users, even though they might have widely differing knowledge of the subject. Such a system suffers from an inability to be all things to all people, especially when the user population is relatively diverse; users often lose sight of the goal of...

We are now witnessing an extensive and gradually increasing use of the World Wide Web space, proved to be a quite favourable way of communication, due to its speed, simplicity and efficiency. Distance learning (or eLearning) is considered one of the most rapidly evolving application areas of the Web that improves the traditional educational process...