Denis Lalanne

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at University of Fribourg

This article extends our 2023 ASSETS paper, “A Large-Scale Mixed-Methods Analysis of Blind and Low-vision Research in ACM and IEEE,” which provided a field-, technology-, and method-agnostic examination of blind and low-vision (BLV) research. Our mixed-methods approach combined quantitative bibliometric analyses with a qualitative analysis of the f...

This study presents a comprehensive dataset capturing indoor environmental parameters, physiological responses, and subjective perceptions across three global cities. Utilizing wearable sensors, including smart eyeglasses, and a modified Cozie app, environmental and physiological data were collected, along with pre-screening, onboarding, and recurr...

This study presents a comprehensive dataset capturing indoor environmental parameters, physiological responses, and subjective perceptions across three global cities. Utilizing wearable sensors, including smart eyeglasses, and a modified Cozie app, environmental and physiological data were collected, along with pre-screening, onboarding, and recurr...

Introduction The use of multiple interfaces may improve the perception of a stronger relationship between a conversational virtual coach and older adults. The purpose of this paper is to show the effect of output combinations [single-interface (chatbot, tangible coach), multi-interface (assignment, redundant-complementary)] of two distinct conversa...

Properties of light impact both psychological and physiological aspects. In this context, the effects of light’s correlated colour temperature (CCT) appear less studied than the effects of illuminance, although CCT is known to impact circadian rhythms responsible to maintain day and night cycles. Recently, Human-centric lighting (HCL) proposed to e...

This article provides an ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic investigation of visually recognisable aspects of shared work spots in co-working office rooms. We focus on the phenomenon of holding a place in such environments, and document the participants’ practices which constitute distinguishing between empty and taken places. Our investig...

In 2020, we have witnessed global experimentation of remote co-working, co-learning, and co-habiting, leading to the re-emergence of a collective search for platforms and paradigms that can optimally coalesce the virtual and physical settings - what has been studied as "hybrid models". In this context, we examine the opportunities that the advances...

People with visual impairments (PVI) are characterized as a diverse population of users due to multiple vision impairments like visual acuity, light and glare sensitivity, contrast sensitivity, limited field of vision, color blindness. In that context, adaptation is a key element for coping with diversity in the field of Human-Computer Interaction...

The high concentration of air pollutants in indoor environments can have a remarkable adverse impact on health and well-being, cognitive performance and productivity. Indoor air pollutants are especially problematic in naturally ventilated shared spaces such as classrooms and meeting rooms, where human-generated pollutants can rise rapidly. When th...

Electric lighting energy expenses has gained importance in the last decades representing a large part of the global energy expense worldwide. The increase of the proportion of glazed building facades is an incomplete solution raising other problems regarding thermal and visual comfort, while rebound effects in terms of lighting usage lowered the en...

Empathy plays a crucial role in human life, and the evolution of technology is affecting the way humans interact with machines. The area of affective computing is attracting considerable interest within the human–computer interaction community. However, the area of empathic interactions has not been explored in depth. This systematic review explore...

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-0512.vid ATC simulators play an important role both in the development of new solutions by the research community and in the training curriculum of Air Traffic Control (ATC) trainees. Current tools are limited in either their availability, their ease of use (steep learning curve) or the featur...

Recent advances in the field of assistive devices technology represent a great opportunity for improving the quality of life of people with moderate to severe visual impairment. However, it is still unclear what are the precise daily difficulties, needs and expectations of the smart glasses technology for visually impaired individuals. To this aim,...

Task-lighting is a well-known strategy to save energy by bringing light where it is most needed, providing adaptable localised light conditions of special interest in the current home-office context. Despite these benefits and in addition to negatively impacting biological rhythms, the generalization of backlit screens has made task lights less dem...

Objective: Internet-based guided self-help (GSH) programs increase accessibility and utilization of evidence-based treatments in binge-eating disorder (BED). We evaluated acceptance and short as well as long-term efficacy of our 8-session internet-based GSH program in a randomized clinical trial with an immediate treatment group, and two waitlist...

Annotations produced by analysts during the exploration of a data visualization are a precious source of knowledge. Harnessing this knowledge requires a thorough structure of annotations, but also a means to acquire them without harming user engagement. The main contribution of this article is a method, taking the form of an interface, that offers...

The advent of back-lit screens in contemporary offices has profoundly impacted the field of visual comfort. Screen users typically fail to adapt to changing environments and often require an individual light quality. To this end, the new approach of human-building interaction in computer science would consider the context of occupants interacting w...

Eye movements are a functional signature of how the visual system effectively decodes and adapts to the environment. However, scientific knowledge in eye movements mostly arises from studies conducted in laboratories, with well-controlled stimuli presented in constrained unnatural settings. Only a few studies have attempted to directly compare and...

The population of people age 65 or over is increasing especially in Europe [3]. Granting to this target population a longer and healthier life is paramount for the European Community. In the context of the H2020 EU funded project “NESTORE” [11], an embodied and ubiquitous e-coach is being developed seeking to change the lifestyle of seniors in diff...

Humans nowadays are tending to spend too much time in front of their screens. Direct interaction between humans is falling in numbers and people are losing their empathic behaviour. By integrating empathy and emotions in everyday objects researchers can address this problem. In addition we can have a positive effect on our lives, from physical and...

With the ultimate objective of enhancing health and well-being in shared office spaces, we have developed real-time predictive models of indoor CO2 level and then examined alternative user interaction scenarios with the prediction outcome. The specific aim is to persuade office workers to take timely preventive actions when a high level of carbon d...

Daily life problems, can lead to distress, which has a harmful effect on health. Individuals are using machines for longer period. Machines should now have the ability to understand and show empathy which relies on trying to help the other through their emotional situation. In this study, showing empathy is done by reducing the effect of negative s...

Since the introduction of the iconic Aware Home project [39] in 1999, the notion of “living laboratory” has been taken up and developed in HCI research. Many of the underpinning assumptions have evolved over the past two decades in various directions, while the same nomenclature is employed—inevitably in ambiguous ways. This contribution seeks to e...

Since the introduction of the iconic Aware Home project [39] in 1999, the notion of "living laboratory" has been taken up and developed in HCI research. Many of the underpinning assumptions have evolved over the past two decades in various directions, while the same nomenclature is employed - inevitably in ambiguous ways. This contribution seeks to...

Through the use of a data-centric technique for analyzing Building Management System (BMS) data, the article discusses the shortcomings of current building data acquisition for capturing occupants’ behaviour. Applying machine learning to a real 3-years dataset, the potential of unsupervised learning for discriminating between normal daily patterns...

We describe Vasco, a data visualization tool for inexperienced users. Vasco is designed to allow and promote early exploration of data, targeting users without experience in the design of visualizations and data analysis. Vasco structures the interface to select easily data and create visualizations, using panels and cards. Vasco automatically gene...

A smart luminaire able to change the direction of its light beam is installed in an office environment and compared to the available LEDs fixtures. Standard lighting measures are performed and a controlled user experiment is conducted, involving 22 subjects. Qualitative results suggest that very low illuminance levels can be characterized as comfor...

Autonomous Passenger Shuttles (APS) are rapidly becoming an urban public transit alternative. Traversing populous commercial and residential centers, these shuttles are already operating in several cities. In the absence of a human driver and embedded means of communicating the autonomous shuttle's intent, the task of seamlessly navigating crosswal...

Annotations are observations made during the exploration of a specific data visualization, which can be recorded as text or visual data selection. This article introduces a classification framework that allows a systematic description of annotations. To create the framework, a real dataset of 302 annotations authored by 16 analysts was collected. T...

Interaction design is increasingly about embedding interactive technologies in our built environment; architecture is increasingly about the use of interactive technologies to reimagine and dynamically repurpose our built environment. This forum focuses on this intersection of interaction and architecture. --- Mikael Wiberg, Editor

Driverless Passenger Shuttles are operating as a public transport alternative in the town of Sion, Switzerland since June’16, and traversing the populated commercial and residential zones of the city center. The absence of a human driver and the lack of dedicated AV-pedestrian interface makes it challenging for road users (pedestrians, cyclists, et...

Recognizing the relation between inhabitants and their built environments as a feedback loop, our aim is to capture the temporality of this loop in various scenarios of adaptation. We specifically focus on the emerging types of adaptation that are motivated by digitally acquired personal data, leading to either automation or action taken by the bui...

Buildings and urban spaces increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence and new forms of interactivity, raising a wide span of research questions about the future of human experiences with, and within, built environments. We call this emerging area Human-Building Interaction (HBI) and introduce it as an interdisciplinary domain of research inte...

Background: Binge-eating disorder (BED) is characterized by recurrent episodes of loss of control over eating and is related to a higher prevalence of other mental disorders and somatic consequences associated with overweight and obesity. In community-based samples, 2-4% of women and 1-3% men are diagnosed with BED. Psychotherapeutic interventions...

The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2018) "Bipolar disorder, and cross-cultural affect recognition'' is the eighth competition event aimed at the comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audiovisual health and emotion analysis, with all participants competing strictly under the same conditions...

Due to climate change, the built environment is facing increasingly strict environmental targets. Thus, architects are challenged to design evermore high-performing buildings, a task for which they can no longer depend solely on their experience and intuition. Building performance simulation (BPS) tools have become central in this context to suppor...

The vision and mission of research under the banner of Ubiquitous Computing has increasingly moved from focusing on the realm of "artifacts" to the realm of "environments". We seek to scrutinize this very transition, and raise questions that relate to the specific attributes of built environments that set them inherently apart from artifacts. How d...

The architectural built environments, which so ubiquitously, act as shelters and shape our daily personal and social experiences, can soon be envisioned as being interacted with and mediated through wearables. This conjecture is becoming salient with the increased interactivity of our built environments, and a sustained drive to render them energy...

Where, when and how eye movements are performed to process the visual environment has been of great interest for scientists from a long time. Nowadays, eye-tracking technologies have become precise and affordable, generating an increasing amount of research studies. Even if the use of real-world videos in eye-tracking experiments was recommended fr...

This contribution exemplifies how the study of space perception and its impact on space-use behavior can inform sustainable architecture. We describe our attempt to integrate the methods of user research in an architectural project that was focused on optimization of space usage. In an office building, two large office rooms were refurbished to pro...

Video-based communication has become a common way of interacting with remote interlocutors, whether through complex videoconferencing systems or webcams integrated into consumer technologies. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA) are sociological approaches that have been influential in Human–Computer Interaction for nearly three decad...

This article introduces a classification system for user-authored annotations in the domain of data visualization. The classification system was created with a bottom-up approach, starting from actual user- authored annotations. To devise relevant dimensions for this classification, we designed a data analysis web platform displaying four visualiza...

Parallel Coordinates are a widely used visualization method for multivariate data analysis tasks. In this paper we discuss the techniques that aim to enhance the representation of categorical data in Parallel Coordinates. We propose Parallel Bubbles, a method that improves the graphical perception of categorical dimensions in Parallel Coordinates b...

The architecture, environment and construction industry is facing, on the one hand, ambitious environmental regulations for low carbon and net zero energy buildings, and on the other hand, the emergence of new techniques such as parametric assessment and cloud computing. As a result, there is a dramatic increase of performance analysis and collecte...

Several models and design spaces have been defined and are regularly used to describe how modalities can be fused together in an interactive multimodal system. However, models such as CASE, the CARE properties or TYCOON have all been defined more than two decades ago. In this paper, we start with a critical review of these models, which notably hig...

Comfort as a technical term in the domain of architecture has been used meticulously to describe, assess, and understand some of the essential qualities of buildings, across four dimensions: visual, thermal, acoustic, and respiratory. This body of knowledge can be drawn upon to shed light on the growing branch of HCI that pursues a shift from “arti...

This article presents an explorative study with a smart glasses application developed to help visually impaired individuals to identify faces and facial expressions of emotion. The paper discusses three experiments in which different patients, suffering from distinct pathologies impairing vision, tested our application. These preliminary studies de...

Acknowledging the current digitalizing of buildings and their existence as interactive objects, this article sets out to consolidate Human-Building Interaction (HBI) as a new research domain within HCI. It exposes fundamental characteristics of HBI such as user immersion in the “machine” and extensive space and time scales, and proposes an operatio...

To investigate the relationship between occupants’ perception of control over building elements and their comfort, we conducted a study where two prototype office rooms were compared: while the first room allowed occupants to open or close the window and configure the shading, the second one was fully automated. The quantitative analysis of collect...

A prototype of interactive data visualization is proposed for Building Management Systems (BMS). The aim is to enhance traditional data presentation format such as graphs and tables to support expert users in early open-ended exploration of building data. Based on data recorded over 3 years in a real office building in Switzerland, a case study is...

We present a structured discussion of the concept of driverless car as a major Ubicomp project, and particularly of its hypothetical integration into the fabric of city. The analytical framework is borrowed from the Transportation and Urban research domains, which provides us with a list of agreed-upon subject matters when accounting for car mobili...

This case study presents efforts to introduce and encourage consistent application of usability and user interface design principles in an existing large-scale open source project. We present the project in question, the ILIAS learning management system, the challenges involved in incorporating usability into an open source project, the novel solut...

Understanding how people use different spaces in a building can inform design interventions aimed at improving the utility of that building, but can also inform the design of future buildings. We studied space use in an office building following a method we have designed to reveal the occupancy rate and navigational patterns. Our method involves tw...

Interaction design is increasingly about embedding interactive technologies in our built environment; architecture is increasingly about the use of interactive technologies to reimagine and dynamically repurpose our built environment. This forum focuses on this intersection of interaction and architecture.

This paper compares an emergent interaction modality for the In-Vehicle Infotainment System (IVIS), i.e., gesturing on the steering wheel, with two more popular modalities in modern cars: touch in the central dashboard and speech. We conducted a between-subjects experiment with 20 participants for each modality to assess the interaction performance...

In this article we discuss the techniques available to represent categorical data in Parallel Coordinates, a widely used visualisation method for multivariate datasets analysis tasks. We propose Parallel Bubbles, a frequency-based method improving the graphical perception of categorical dimensions in Parallel Coordinates plots. We compare the perfo...

The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2016) "Depression, Mood and Emotion" will be the sixth competition event aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual and physiological depression and emotion analysis, with all participants competing under strictly the same conditions. Th...

To face climate change, Switzerland has introduced the 2050 energy strategy by fixing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the built environment. Designers will, as a result, have to use Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) to increase operating performances while minimizing embodied impacts, but the integration of LCA at an early design stage adds a degree o...

In 2030, we will have a different interactive experience with our built environments, at home, at work, and even in public urban spaces. This is attributed to advancements in sensing and actuation systems that can integrate into the building infrastructures, in symbiosis with the new environmental concerns that call for new life, work, and mobility...

This paper briefly introduces how we approach the domain of Human-Building Interaction (HBI) and describes a set of related ongoing projects in the framework of the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg, Switzerland. While each of these projects investigates a different aspect of Human Building Interaction (e.g. comfort, performance, awareness), they all sh...

The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2016) "Depression, Mood and Emotion" will be the sixth competition event aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual and physiological depression and emotion analysis, with all participants competing under strictly the same conditions. Th...

Students’ ability to understand and manage emotions in self and others plays an important role in the success of collaborative learning (Järvenoja & Järvelä, 2009; Lajoie et al., 2015; Lavoué, Molinari, Prié, & Khezami, 2015). In online learning environments, the use of new social media technologies (blogs, forums, wikis, so-cial networking sites,...

We present the first Audio-Visual+ Emotion recognition Challenge and workshop (AV+EC 2015) aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual and physiological emotion analysis. This is the 5th event in the AVEC series, but the very first Challenge that bridges across audio, video and physiological...

Technology is spreading in our everyday world, and digital interaction beyond the screen, with real objects, allows taking advantage of our natural manipulative and communicative skills. Tangible gesture interaction takes advantage of these skills by bridging two popular domains in Human-Computer Interaction, tangible interaction and gestural inter...

More and more objects of our everyday environment are becoming smart and connected, offering us new interaction possibilities. Tangible interaction and gestural interaction are promising communication means with these objects in this post-WIMP interaction era. Although based on different principles, they both exploit our body awareness and our skil...

This paper presents the concept of a lamp that allows displaying and collecting user's emotional states. In particular, it displays the emotional information changing colors and facial expressions; in fact, the lamp is characterized by anthropomorphic form and behavior in order to make the interaction more natural and spontaneous. The user can inte...

We present the first Audio-Visual+ Emotion recognition Challenge and workshop (AV+EC 2015) aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual and physiological emotion analysis. This is the 5th event in the AVEC series, but the very first Challenge that bridges across audio, video and physiological...

We present a concept where the smart environments of the future will be able to provide ubiquitous affective communication. All the surfaces will become interactive and the furniture will display emotions. In particular, we present a first prototype that allows people to share their emotional states in a natural way. The input will be given through...

Automatic emotion recognition systems based on supervised machine learning require reliable annotation of affective behaviours to build useful models. Whereas the dimensional approach is getting more and more popular for rating affective behaviours in continuous time domains, e.g., arousal and valence, methodologies to take into account reaction la...

This article presents the design of a lamp that is able to represent and collect users' emotional states through a multimodal interaction based on tangible gestures on the users' side, and colors and facial expressions on the lamp side. In particular, the lamp benefits of anthropomorphic form and behavior in order to make the interaction more natur...