Fabio Paternò

Italian National Research Council | CNR · Human Interfaces in Information Systems Laboratory

The proliferation of sensors and smart Internet of Things (IoT) devices in our everyday environments is reshaping our interactions with everyday objects. This change underlines the need to empower non-expert users to easily configure the behaviour of these devices to align with their preferences and habits. At the same time, recent advances in gene...

This paper presents a comprehensive survey on End-User Development for Human-Robot Interaction, examining existing literature to validate findings and identify unexplored areas for future research. It explores the importance of End-User Development in allowing non-expert users to customise robots, covering methodologies, evaluation methods, robot t...

Automations can help support the achievement of various types of goals in a smart home. We present an architecture enabling the possibility of supporting user goals consistent with the principles of a circular economy (such as energy saving and waste recycling). It includes meta-design tools for creating automations that better fit user needs and c...

The main current technological trends are the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. Indeed, current forecasts indicate that while the number of general purpose devices (e.g. smartphones, laptops) is slightly increasing, the number of connected objects (objects of our everyday life) is increasing in an almost exponential way. Thus, such te...

Seeking better explanations for how algorithmic decisions are made.

Humanoid robots can be an effective tool for the cognitive training of older adults. For this purpose, it is important that their interaction be engaging. In this study, we investigate whether proposing robots exhibiting extraverted or introverted personalities can improve user experience. In particular, we have designed and implemented a set of mu...

Automations in the context of smart homes have been adopted more and more frequently; thus, users should be able to control them and create automations most suitable to their needs. Current solutions for this purpose are based on visual apps with conceptual representations of possible automation elements. However, they tend to be static, abstract,...

At this time, there is a lot of discussion and attention on the adoption of artificial intelligence in real-world automations. In this panel, we will discuss the role of Human-Computer Interaction in creating meaningful devices, applications and systems to obtain automations that exploit technologies from artificial intelligence in such a way as to...

One issue in aging is how to stimulate the cognitive skills of older adults. One way to address it is the use of serious games delivered through humanoid robots, to provide engaging ways to perform exercises to train memory, attention, processing, and planning activities. We present an approach in which a humanoid robot, by using various modalities...

The continuously increasing number of connected objects and sensors is opening up the possibility of introducing automations in many domains to better support people in their activities. However, such automations to be effective should be under the user control. Unfortunately, people often report difficulties in understanding the surrounding automa...

Smart homes are becoming a widespread reality given the increasingly available number of connected objects and sensors. However, it is still unclear what people expect from automations that are made possible by this technological evolution. In addition, it is unclear whether current trigger-action programming (TAP) languages offer sufficient operat...

The monotonous nature of repetitive cognitive training may cause losing interest in it and dropping out by older adults. This study introduces an adaptive technique that enables a Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) to select the most appropriate actions to maintain the engagement level of older adults while they play the serious game in cognitive train...

Humanoid robots can be an effective tool for the cognitive training of older adults. For this purpose, it is important that their interaction be engaging. In this study, we investigate whether proposing robots exhibiting extraverted or introverted personalities can improve user experience. For this purpose, we have designed and implemented a set of...

The importance of guaranteeing accessible Web applications is becoming widely recognised, and supported by national and international legislation. This implies an increasing need for large scale validations, which can be achieved only through automatic support. Thus, there is a need for a new generation of accessibility validation tools able to che...

Several Web accessibility evaluation tools have been put forward to reduce the burden of identifying accessibility barriers for users, especially those with disabilities. One common issue in using accessibility evaluation tools in practice is that the results provided by different tools are sometimes unclear, and often diverging. Such limitations m...

This work aims to explore the potentialities of an end-user personalisation platform in industrial settings. In such a context, stakeholders with different roles and competencies collaborate to manage and control an environment where legacy machines coexist and interact with newer ones. Our goal is to provide a rule-based tool that allows end-users...

Epidemiological and etiological studies have shown that, both in the clinical population and in the general population, Dyslexia co-occurs frequently with Attention and Hyperactivity Disorder. For these reasons, this work proposes a solution that aims to stimulate children suffering from both conditions in the relevant cognitive aspects, which are...

The combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made it possible to introduce numerous automations in our daily environments. Many new interesting possibilities and opportunities have been enabled, but there are also risks and problems. Often these problems originated from approaches that have not been able to c...

In the last few years, several end-user tools have been designed to help people who are not professional developers in programming their smart environments. However, such tools are often based on structured visual editors providing abstract representations of the available connected sensors and objects, which can be problematic for end users, and d...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and End-User Development (EUD) look at automation from two different perspectives. The former tends to provide fully automatic solutions, the latter aims to empower users to directly create what they want. We need both, but it is still unclear how to combine them to obtain effective every-day automations that meet the f...

The design and development of the so-called smart objects have become a huge trend in the last decade, thanks to the proliferation of low-cost technologies embedded with sensors and actuators. A major role in further fostering this tendency has been played by the Internet of Things (IoT), which connects the physical world with the Internet via ubiq...

The rapid pervasive diffusion of Internet of Things technologies has opened up many opportunities for people to directly personalise the behaviour of surrounding objects and devices based on the dynamic events that can occur. To this end, several tailoring environments have been proposed supporting the end-user creation of trigger-action rules. Suc...

The purpose of this work is to explore the potentialities of a personalization platform in industrial settings. We report on a case study in the paper factory domain, in which the industrial aspects identified with relevant experts through interviews have been simulated and connected with a personalization platform. A first user test has been carri...

Several web accessibility evaluation tools have been put forward to reduce the burden of identifying accessibility barriers for disabled people. One common issue in using accessibility evaluation tools in practice is that the results provided by different tools are often variable. Such variability may confuse the users who may not understand the re...

This paper presents how the TAREME (Trigger-Action Rule Editing, Monitoring, Executing) platform provides support for executing and analysing personalized automations in Internet of Things scenarios. The platform allows the creation and execution of trigger-action personalization rules that can change the state of connected smart objects and device...

Given the growing adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, several approaches have been presented to enable people to increase their control over their smart devices and provide relevant support. Recommendation systems have been proposed in many domains, but have received limited attention in the area of End-User Development (EUD). We pro...

Vocal assistants are becoming widely used, but their potentialities have not yet been completely exploited. For instance, while assistants such as Alexa are increasingly boasting compatibility with a large set of third-party services, the possibility for end-users to personalize the joint behaviour of such connected services (including the voice-ba...

The number of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) older adults is increasing; thus, it becomes more and more important to provide them with support to avoid, or at least slow down, their cognitive decline. To this end, interactive serious games can play an important role. So far, most of them have been deployed through tablets, which represent a cost-e...

Automatic support for web accessibility validation needs to evolve for several reasons. The increasingly recognised importance of accessibility implies that various stakeholders, with different expertise, look at it from different viewpoints and have different requirements regarding the types of outputs they expect. The technologies used to support...

The main goal of this work is to understand how to obtain effective transitions when changing the Web user interfaces from one that stimulates negative affective states to one eliciting more positive emotions. The objective is to improve User eXperience (UX) and usability during the interaction. The transitions applied during the user interface ada...

This paper discusses the motivations behind and the characterising concepts of multi-device user interfaces by looking at the main design issues that have been addressed and the various solutions proposed. The discussion of relevant systems and frameworks highlights their main features, which are then used as the basis for comparative discussion. I...

The main goal of this work is to better understand how vibrotactile feedback obtained through wearable actuators can support indoor orientation in unfamiliar buildings. We designed different wearable vibrotactile prototypes (two wristbands, a flexible/rigid glove, one wristband, a cap and two-bands), and we analysed them in a preliminary test with...

Seamless interaction across personal and public devices is still problematic. Gestural interaction can be a useful support for this purpose, but how to exploit it in cross-device frameworks is still unclear. We present an elicitation study aiming to contribute in identifying the most intuitive single or combined gestures that people can perform to...

The advent of the Internet of Things and mobile applications has made the possible contexts of use more and more varied, and creates new challenges for user interface developers. Although model-based approaches aim to support the generation of applications for different implementation technologies, limited attention has been paid to how to exploit...

The pervasiveness of ICT technologies has led to a growing need to empower people to obtain applications that meet their specific requirements. End-User Development (EUD) is a growing research field aiming to provide people without programming experience with concepts, methods and tools to allow them to create or modify their applications. Recent m...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurological disorder that impacts behavior, communication and social skills of affected individuals. The difficulty of youth with ASD to know how to properly approach other people leads to increasing isolation and stronger dependence on their parents, who often experience insufficient support especially after th...

Rapid population aging and the availability of sensors and intelligent objects motivate the development of healthcare systems; these systems, in turn, meet the needs of older adults by supporting them to accomplish their day-to-day activities. Collecting information regarding older adults daily activity potentially helps to detect abnormal behavior...

One of the goals of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions is to extend the time that elderly people can live independently in their preferred environments by using ICT technologies for personal healthcare. However, in order to be optimal, remote monitoring services and health-related interventions should be strongly personalised to specific indiv...

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 rising spread of humanoid robots in various settings of human life, and their increasing affordability, as well as the massive adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) in various scenarios have made End User Development (EUD) for robotic and IoT applications an interesting research direction. In particular, in the EUD field, trigger-action rule...

The AAL PETAL project has developed a platform for personalising remote assistance of older adults with mild cognitive impairments. The platform is targeted at caregivers without programming knowledge in order to help seniors in their daily activities at home.

In this chapter, we discuss methods and tools for adapting user interfaces to make them more accessible. We introduce the problem of user interface adaptation and characterize different techniques to be adapted to the user interface. We show that there is a broad range of methods and tools to transform existing interfaces to make them accessible. W...

Il Web è lo strumento più diffuso e pervasivo per comunicare informazioni, stimolare la crescita di comunità o fornire servizi interattivi. Oggigiorno, i dispositivi più comuni per la navigazione Web sono gli smartphone, che ormai da tempo hanno superato i personal computer nelle statistiche relative all'accesso in rete. Conseguentemente, nell'ambi...

This paper presents the architecture of Web Accessibility Directive Decision Support Environment (WADcher), a unified web accessibility assessment framework for large-scale assessment of compliance against web accessibility recommendations and legislations. It aims to provide customized support for various user groups like web commissioners, web de...

In the coming years humanoid robots will be increasingly used in a variety of contexts, thereby presenting many opportunities to exploit their capabilities in terms of what they can sense and do. One main challenge is to design technologies that enable those who are not programming experts to personalize robot behaviour. We propose an end user deve...

Automated systems and their interfaces are increasingly merging with our ambient environmentleading to a heightened impact on our everyday leisure and work experiences. While automationsystems have been a realm for highly specialized tasks and trained experts until recently, now moreand more non-expert users encounter automated systems in their eve...

Trigger-action programming is an emerging paradigm for personalizing the behaviour of Internet of Things applications and services. In this area some recent research efforts have been dedicated to designing environments able to support people without programming experience in specifying the desired personalization rules. Little attention has been p...

The Trigger-Action programming paradigm has been widely adopted in the last few years, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain because it allows end users without programming experience to describe how their applications should react to the many events that can occur in such very dynamic contexts. Several end user development tools exist,...

We describe the design of a Web-based game application aimed to support high-functioning individuals affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder in gaining skills that can help them understand the concept of money and apply it in practical life situations. In order to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the games, a user study involving six high-f...

End users need tools to enable them to control and personalise Internet of Things (IoT) applications, which may involve hundreds of interconnected objects. Trigger-action programming has shown to be a useful support for this purpose because it allows users to easily associate dynamic events with the activation of desired effects. End User Developme...

This paper presents the architecture of a decision support environment for large-scale assessment of compliance against web accessibility recommendations and legislations. The proposed decision support environment aims at integrating, extending and further enhancing existing web accessibility solutions making them customizable to the needs of diffe...

With today's technology, elderly can be supported in living independently in their own homes for a prolonged period of time. Monitoring and analyzing their behavior in order to find possible unusual situation helps to provide the elderly with health warnings at the proper time. Current studies are focusing on the elderly daily activity and the dete...

Remote monitoring services should be strongly personalised to the specific needs, preferences, abilities and motivations of elderly, a population segment whose characteristics can largely vary and even dynamically evolve over time for the same individual, depending on changing needs and usage contexts. We present a demo showing how a platform suppo...

This study aims to understand the potential of using vibrotactile stimulation for indoor orientation in complex, unfamiliar buildings. Four vibrotactile prototypes have been analysed and tested in initial trials in order to investigate the benefits and the problems of each solution. The main goal of this study is to reach a better understanding of...

In order to exploit the wide availability of public displays and personal devices on the mass market at affordable prices it is important to provide developers with frameworks that ease obtaining cross-device user interfaces able to exploit such device ecosystems. We present the design and implementation of a Web framework for the development of cr...

One of the goals of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions is to extend the time that elderly people can live independently in their preferred environments by using ICT technologies for personal healthcare. However, in order to be optimal, remote monitoring services and health-related interventions should be strongly personalised to specific indiv...

Remote usability evaluation enables the possibility of analysing users' behaviour in their daily settings. We present a method and an associated tool able to identify potential usability issues through the analysis of client-side logs of mobile Web interactions. Such log analysis is based on the identification of specific usability smells. We descr...