Fabio Pianesi

• Fondazione Bruno Kessler

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are bei...

In the Workshop on Computational Personality Recognition (Shared Task), we released two datasets, varying in size and genre, annotated with gold standard personality labels. This allowed participants to evaluate features and learning techniques, and even to compare the performances of their systems for personality recognition on a common benchmark....

The purpose of this chapter is to stimulate a critical attitude toward issues of temporal reference in linguistic theory, keeping in mind that the concepts of temporal reference and tense are not one and the same notion, though strongly connected. Temporal reference can be defined as the relation between the time of the utterance and the time the u...

The recent personality psychology literature has coined the name of personality states to refer to states having the same behavioural, affective and cognitive content (described by adjectives) as the corresponding trait, but for a shorter duration. The variability in personality states may be the reaction to specific characteristics of situations....

The wide adoption of mobile devices and social media platforms have dramatically increased the collection and sharing of personal information. More and more frequently, users are called to take decisions concerning the disclosure of their personal information. In this study, we investigate the factors affecting users' choices toward the disclosure...

The wide adoption of mobile devices and social media platforms have dramatically increased the collection and sharing of personal information. More and more frequently, users are called to take decisions concerning the disclosure of their personal information. In this study, we investigate the factors affecting users' choices toward the disclosure...

Stress can impact many aspects of our lives, such as the way we interact and work with others, or the first impressions that we make. In the past, stress has most commonly been assessed through self-reported questionnaires; however, advancements in wearable technology have enabled the measurement of physiological symptoms of stress in an unobtrusiv...

This chapter provides an overview of the methods that can be used to automatically acquire information about an individual’s personality. In particular, we focus our attention on the sources of data (e.g. text, audio, video, mobile phones, wearable sensors, etc.) and the features used to automatically infer personality. For each data source, we dis...

In this paper, we exploit different facets of the Friends and Family study to deal with two personality-related tasks of paramount importance for the user modeling and ubiquitous computing fields. First, we propose and validate an approach for automatic classification of personality traits based on the ego-networks’ structural characteristics. Our...

Incorporating research on personality recognition into computers, both from a cognitive as well as an engineering perspective, would facilitate the interactions between humans and machines. Previous attempts on personality recognition have focused on a variety of different corpora (ranging from text to audiovisual data), scenarios (interviews, meet...

People divide their time unequally among their social contacts due to time constraints and varying strength of relationships. It was found that high diversity of social communication, dividing time more evenly among social contacts, is correlated with economic well-being both at macro and micro levels. Besides economic well-being, it is not clear h...

Energy efficiency is a key challenge for building sustainable societies. Due to growing populations, increasing incomes and the industrialization of developing countries, the world primary energy consumption is expected to increase annually by 1.6%. This scenario raises issues related to the increasing scarcity of natural resources, the acceleratin...

A key acceptability criterion for artificial agents will be the possible moral implications of their actions. In particular, intelligent persuasive systems (systems designed to influence humans via communication) constitute a highly sensitive topic because of their intrinsically social nature. Still, ethical studies in this area are rare and tend t...

The exploration of people’s everyday life has long been of interest to social scientists. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in analyzing human behavioral data generated by technology (e.g. mobile phones). To date, a few large-scale studies have been designed to measure human behaviors and interactions using multiple sources of data. A...

The goal of the present thematic series is to showcase some of the most relevant contributions submitted to the 'Telecom Italia Big Data Challenge 2014' and to provide a discussion venue about recent advances in the appplication of mobile phone and social media data to the study of individual and collective behaviors. Particular attention is devote...

A diary approach was used to explore location-sharing preferences of 126 parents with young children with the goal of investigating which elements play a role in their decision to share their location. During a 3-week user study, we daily collected parents’ preferences of location sharing along with data related to the physical and social context,...

The wealth of information provided by real-time streams of data has paved the way for life-changing technological advancements, improving the quality of life of people in many ways, from facilitating knowledge exchange to self-understanding and self-monitoring. Moreover, the analysis of anonymized and aggregated large-scale human behavioral data of...

Contagion, a concept from epidemiology, has long been used to characterize social influence on people's behavior and affective (emotional) states. While it has revealed many useful insights, it is not clear whether the contagion metaphor is sufficient to fully characterize the complex dynamics of psychological states in a social context. Using wear...

This work investigates in-depth the communication practices within a workplace to understand whether workers interact face to face or more indirectly with email. We analysed the interactions to understand how these changes affect our work (productivity, deadlines, interesting task) and our wellbeing (positive and negative affective states),by using...

The Workshop on Computational Personality Recognition aims to define the state-of-the-art in the field and to provide tools for fu-ture standard evaluations in personality recognition tasks. In the WCPR14 we released two different datasets: one of Youtube Vlogs and one of Mobile Phone interactions. We structured the work-shop in two tracks: an open...

This paper presents an assessment of the experience with a Living Lab project which is currently involving 128 families with young children in a long-term relation to design mobile services for this user group. Living Labs are a promising way to manage innovation yet they also pose several challenges to retain participants and to keep their motivat...

We present a new similarity measure based on information theoretic measures which is superior than Normalized Compression Distance for clustering problems and inherits the useful properties of conditional Kolmogorov complexity. We show that Normalized Compression Dictionary Size and Normalized Compression Dictionary Entropy are computationally more...

Research has proven that stress reduces quality of life and causes many diseases. For this reason, several researchers devised stress detection systems based on physiological parameters. However, these systems require that obtrusive sensors are continuously carried by the user. In our paper, we propose an alternative approach providing evidence tha...

In this paper, we present a novel approach to predict crime in a geographic space from multiple data sources, in particular mobile phone and demographic data. The main contribution of the proposed approach lies in using aggregated and anonymized human behavioral data derived from mobile network activity to tackle the crime prediction problem. While...

Given the fast rise of increasingly autonomous artificial agents and robots, a key acceptability criterion will be the possible moral implications of their actions. In particular, intelligent persuasive systems (systems designed to influence humans via communication) constitute a highly sensitive topic because of their intrinsically social nature....

In this paper we provide the evidence that daily stress can be reliably recognized based on human behavior metrics derived from the mobile phone activity (call log, sms log, bluetooth interactions). We introduce an original approach for feature extraction, selection, recognition model training and discuss the experimental results based on Random Fo...

In this paper we provide the evidence that daily stress can be reliably recognized based on human behavior metrics derived from the mobile phone activity (call log, sms log, bluetooth interactions). We introduce an original approach for feature extraction, selection, recognition model training and discuss the experimental results based on Random Fo...

Recent studies in social and personality psychology introduced the notion of personality states conceived as concrete behaviors that can be described as having the same contents as traits. Our paper is a first step towards addressing automatically this new perspective. In particular, we will focus on the classification of excerpts of social behavio...

While our daily activities usually involve interactions with others, the current methods on activity recognition do not often exploit the relationship between social interactions and human activity. This paper addresses the problem of interpreting social activity from human interactions captured by mobile sensing networks. Our first goal is to disc...

In this paper we provide the first evidence that daily happiness of individuals can be automatically recognized using an extensive set of indicators obtained from the mobile phone usage data (call log, sms and Bluetooth proximity data) and "background noise" indicators coming from the weather factor and personality traits. Our final machine learnin...

Do we tend to perceive ourselves more creative when surrounded by creative people? Or rather the opposite holds? Such information is very valuable to understand how to optimize work processes and boost people's productivity along with their happiness and satisfaction. Exploiting real-life data, collected over a period of six weeks in a research ins...

In the Workshop on Computational Personality Recognition (Shared Task), we released two datasets, varying in size and genre, annotated with gold standard personality labels. This allowed participants to evaluate features and learning techniques, and even to compare the performances of their systems for personality recognition on a common benchmark....

In this column, the author discuss two approaches to automatic personality prediction. The first approach takes inspiration from human processes of personality attribution, whereby humans deploy knowledge about personality to attribute traits to other people, even those they never met before and even on the basis of very short sequences (down to a...

The paper addresses the automatic recognition of social and task-oriented functional roles in small-group meetings, focusing on several properties: a) the importance of non-linguistic behaviors, b) the relative time-consistency of the social roles played by a given person during the course of a meeting, and c) the interplays and mutual constraints...

In the NETCARITY project, we conducted several complementary investigation activities with elderly people revolving around the design of technology for the home environment. In this paper, we investigate the potential impact of virtual characters in making the interaction with the technology-enhanced home more effective and engaging. We briefly dis...

In this paper we modeled the effects that dominant people might induce on the nonverbal behavior (speech energy and body motion) of the other meeting participants using Granger causality technique. Our initial hypothesis that more dominant people have generalized higher influence was not validated when using the DOME-AMI corpus as data source. Howe...

The user's personality in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) plays an important role for the overall success of the interaction. The present study focuses on automatically recognizing the Big Five personality traits from 2-5 min long videos, in which the computer interacts using different levels of collaboration, in order to elicit the manifestation...

In this work, we investigate the relationships between social network structure and personality; we assess the performances of different subsets of structural network features, and in particular those concerned with ego-networks, in predicting the Big-5 personality traits. In addition to traditional survey-based data, this work focuses on social ne...

This paper presents the SocioMetric Badges Corpus, a new corpus for social interaction studies collected during a 6 weeks contiguous period in a research institution, monitoring the activity of 53 people. The design of the corpus was inspired by the need to provide researchers and practitioners with: a) raw digital trace data that could be used to...

In this paper, we describe a novel approach, based on Markov jump processes, to model group interaction dynamics and group performance. In particular, we estimate conversational events such as turn taking, backchannels, turntransitions at the micro-level (1 minute windows) and then we bridge the micro-level behavior and the macro-level performance....

The 2nd International Workshop on Human Behavior Un-derstanding (HBU'11) focuses on inducing behavioral change via com-puter systems that can analyse human behavior and communicate per-suasive messages accordingly. While analysis techniques that involve pat-tern recognition, signal processing and machine learning are very rele-vant to this aim, the...

Personality plays an important role in the way people manage the images they convey in self-presentations and employment interviews, trying to affect the other's first impressions and increase effectiveness. This paper addresses the automatically detection of the Big Five personality traits from short self-presentations, by investigating the effect...

In this paper, we target the automatic recognition of personality states in a meeting scenario employing visual and acoustic features. The social psychology literature has coined the name personality state to refer to a specific behavioral episode wherein a person behaves as more or less introvert/extrovert, neurotic or open to experience, etc. Per...

Pervasive sensing and human behavior understanding can help us in implementing or improving systems that can induce behavioral change. In this introductory paper of the 2nd International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding (HBU'11), which has a special focus theme of “Inducing Behavioral Change”, we provide a taxonomy to describe where and how...

Personality plays an important role in the way people manage the images they convey in self-presentations and employment interviews, trying to affect the other"s first impressions and increase effectiveness. This paper addresses the automatically detection of the Big Five personality traits from short (30-120 seconds) self-presentations, by investi...

We propose the use of Granger Causality to model the effects that dominant people induce on the other participants’ behavioral patterns during small group interactions. We test the proposed approach on a dataset of brainstorming and problem solving tasks collected using the sociometric badges’ accelerometers. The expectation that more dominant peop...

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of several dynamic graphical models for the task of personality states classification in a meeting scenario. Personality states are defined in social psychology literature as specific behavioral episodes in which a given subject exposes behaviors connected to a certain personality trait. The personali...

In this paper we propose a new type of system explicitly aimed at influencing immediate behavior in an informal, non goal-oriented co-located small group. The state of the group dynamics is automatically assessed in order for the system to continuously plan and deploy minimalist strategies using evocative means to influence behavior, rather than ex...

In this paper, we present a formal model of group discussion dyanmics. An understanding of the face-to-face communications in a group discussion can provide new clues about how humans collaborate to accomplish complex tasks and how the collaboration protocols can be learned. It can also help us to evaluate and facilitate brainstorming sessions. We...

We present a model for unconstrained and unobtrusive identification and tracking of people in smart environments and answering queries about their whereabouts. Our model supports biometric recognition based upon multiple modalities such as face, gait, ...

We propose and investigate a paradigm for activity recognition, distinguishing the “on-going activity” recognition task (OGA) from that addressing “complete activities” (CA). The former starts from a time interval and aims to discover which activities are going on inside it. The latter, in turn, focuses on terminated activities and amounts to takin...

In order to predict the Extraversion personality trait, we exploit medium-grained behaviors enacted in group meetings, namely, speaking time and social attention (social gaze). The latter will be further distinguished into attention given to the group members and attention received from them. The results of our work confirm many of our hypotheses:...

This work contributes to the task of automatically analyzing people's personality during social interaction by using acoustic and visual features. We focus on two personality traits: Extraversion, one of the Big Five dimensions, and the Locus of Control and submit them to two causal Bayesian models that differ according to whether they incorporate...

This paper presents a multimodal framework employing eye-gaze, head-pose and speech cues to explain observed social attention patterns in meeting scenes. We first investigate a few hypotheses concerning social attention and characterize meetings and individuals based on ground-truth data. This is followed by replication of ground-truth results thro...

This paper presents the design ideas and a preliminary study of a touch-based gestural interface to support older adults in social networking. We had the hypothesis that the directness of gestures made them well suited to implement an interaction metaphor based on familiarity. Although preliminary, this hypothesis can be sustained. In particular, w...

Motivation -- Investigate the acceptance of a monitoring technology by older people when presented as part of a tele-assistance service. Research approach -- Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to investigate the attitude of 10 older people towards a tele-assistance service augmented by a sensor network installed at home. Data were colle...

Motivation -- This pilot study wants to explore the effect of a touch-screen on the rehabilitation of acquired dysgraphia. The outcomes of the study might be useful for the design of a tele-rehabilitation system for handwriting disorders. Research approach -- The touch-screen is compared with the more traditional, pencil-and-paper approach. A speci...

In our paper we focus on the usage of different kind of "honest" signals for the automatic prediction of two personality traits, Extraversion and Locus of Control. In particular, we investigate the predictive power of four classes of speech honest signal features (Conversational Activity, Emphasis, Influence, and Mimicry), along with three fidgetin...

In this article, we propose a model for the addition of user information to sensor data. The problem is that it is difficult to identify a user of objects that are used by multiple people and to define a unique way to identify the user. The proposed ...

The pervasive sensing technologies found in smart environments offer unprecedented opportunities for monitoring and assisting the individuals who live and work in these spaces. An aspect of daily life that is important for one's emotional and physical ...

Tabletop interfaces are a novel class of technologies that are particularly suited to support co-located collaboration. The Collaborative Puzzle Game (CPG) is a tabletop interactive activity developed for fostering collaboration skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The CPG features an interaction rule called Enforced Collaborati...

It is a common experience in our modern world, for us humans to be overwhelmed by the complexities of technological artifacts around us, and by the attention they demand. While technology provides wonderful support and helpful assistance, it also causes an increased preoccupation with technology itself and a related fragmentation of attention. But...

A café table is a traditional setting for conversation. Tabletop displays may have an active role in this connection. In particular for a museum scenario, conversation after the visit is important for a joint elaboration of a small group visit experience. We propose the museum café as the location to introduce a tabletop display meant to foster and...

This article reports on a multi-resolution and multi-sensor approach developed for the accurate and detailed 3D modeling of the entire Roman Forum in Pompei, Italy. The archaeological area, approximately 150 ? 80 m, contains more than 350 finds spread all over the forum as well as larger mural structures of previous buildings and temples. The inter...

This paper targets the automatic detection of individual performances in group tasks by means of short sequences, "thin slices", of nonverbal behavior. We designed our task as a classification one. We also investigated the relevance of social context in our task and the effectiveness of our feature selection.

The paper presents an empirical model of acceptanc e of mobile phones by elderly people. It is based on an extensi on of the widely used TAM- Technology Acceptance Model and aims specifically at investigating the relationship among intrinsic and extrinsic motivati ons to use. The data consists of 740 questionnaires from people over 65 years old . T...

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a 3-week intervention in which a co-located cooperation enforcing interface, called StoryTable, was used to facilitate collaboration and positive social interaction for six children, aged 8-10 years, with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). The intervention focused on exposing pairs of children to an enforced...

Acceptance of adaptive museum guides raises important issues stemming from both the nature of the scenario (museum visit) and the very kind of technological approach adopted (adaptivity). As to the former, museum guides play a utilitarian role in a hedonic scenario; at present, however, it is not clear how this reflects on the balance between intri...

In this paper we target the automatic prediction of two personality traits, Extraversion and Locus of Control, in a meeting scenario using visual and acoustic features. We designed our task as a regression one where the goal is to predict the personality traits' scores obtained by the meeting participants. Support Vector Regression is applied to th...

Smart homes for the aging population have recently started attracting the attention of the research community. One of the problems of interest is this of monitoring the activities of daily living (ADLs) of the elderly aiming at their protection and well-being. In this work, we present our initial efforts to automatically recognize ADLs using multim...

We present the design and an initial evaluation of the Collaborative Puzzle Game (CPG), an interactive game designed with the purpose of creating a technology-supported activity for fostering collaboration in children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Results show that shaping interaction with a set of system-provided rules called ldquoenforced coll...

We present the design and evaluation of the Collaborative Puzzle Game (CPG), a tabletop interactive activity developed for fostering collaboration in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The CPG was inspired by cardboard jigsaw puzzles and runs on the MERL DiamondTouch table [7]. Digital pieces can be manipulated by direct finger touch. Th...

Background: While various Computer Assisted Instruction tools have resulted in mainly positive effects on children with ASD, responses from both professionals and parents have been mixed; along with the obvious advantage of using such environments with children with ASD, there are those who fear that such tools will increase social withdrawal and e...

The domestic environment is more than a place where to live. It is a territory of meaning, a place where pleasure, affect and aesthetics are deeply interwoven with the functional and utilitarian dimensions. With the aging process, the home is progressively invested with new meanings and functions, and becomes the emotional center of older people's...

This paper proposes a new challenge for the Future Internet initiatives: the need of bridging the digital divide that, even in Europe, still hampers the access to the internet for a large part of the population. As a case study, we discuss the design of communication services for elderly people in northern Italy. The process was conducted by a mult...

In this paper, we introduce a novel type of persuasive system aimed at orienting a group conversation in a casual setting. The system is based on a tabletop display complemented by a limited speech recognition system (a word spotter). It affects group behavior indirectly by presenting on the shared interface contextually appropriate visual material...

The domestic environment is more than a place where to live. It is a territory of meaning, a place where pleasure, affect and aesthetics are deeply interwoven with the functional and utilitarian dimensions. With the aging process, the home is progressively invested with new meanings and functions, and becomes the emotional center of older people's...

In this paper we focus on the usage of honest signals for the automatic recognition of functional relational roles. We consider 16 speech honest signal features, along with three fidgeting visual features, and investigate their potential for role classification comparing: a) different labeling convention for relational roles, b) the contribution of...

The complexity of social dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing various kinds of support to dysfunctional teams, from facilitation to training sessions ad...

In this chapter, we describe the design and development of co-located multi user collaborative displays that aim to support effective social interactions within a small group of professionals engaged in meeting activities. Several studies have investigated and tried to go beyond the design paradigm developed for single-user/singledesktop interactio...

This work discusses the results of two user studies aiming to evaluate the NESPOLE! speech-to-speech translation system, which provides for multilingual and multimodal communication in the tourism and in the medical domain, allowing users to interact through the Internet by sharing maps, web-pages and pen-based gestures. The purpose is to investiga...

Services, that is, organized sets of functionalities targeting users, are at the core of the CHIL enterprise. It is at this level, in fact, that the general vision – putting the computer in the loop of human interaction – is made concrete and enjoyable to the user; it is services that users see, interact with, and exploit to better achieve their ob...

This paper targets the automatic detection of personality traits in a meeting environment by means of audio and visual features; information about the relational context is captured by means of acoustic features designed to that purpose. Two personality traits are considered: Extraversion (from the Big Five) and the Locus of Control. The classifica...

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it pos- sible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the...

This paper presents technical setup and methodology used for the data collection in progress within th e NETCARITY project, as of middle of February, 2008. The goal of this work is to collect a large amount of high quality acoustic and visual data, concerning people doing common activities of daily living. The final expected structured and annotate...