
Federica CenaUniversity of Turin | UNITO · Dipartimento di Informatica
Federica Cena
Ph.D.
About
177
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Introduction
Federica Cena is a researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Torino (Italy). She is a member of the Intelligent User Interface group. She received her PhD in 2007 in the area of semantic web for distributed user-adaptive applications.
She is working on user modeling, personalization and semantic web. In the last years, she is mainly devoted in studying the implications of Internet of Things for user modeling and adaptation.
Additional affiliations
June 2003 - June 2004
December 2011 - present
Publications
Publications (177)
Purpose
Because of social interaction difficulties, cognitive characteristics and sensory sensitivity, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may struggle with independence and active participation in urban contexts. Through understanding how people with ASDs experience and perceive urban spaces, the Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Auti...
In this report, we summarise the program and takeaways from the 1 st edition of the Workshop on Information Retrieval for Understudied Users (IR4U2), co-located with the 46 th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR).
Date : 24 March 2024.
Website : https://ir4u2workshop.wixsite.com/ir4u2.
In the current digital landscape, humans take center stage. This has caused a paradigm shift in the realm of intelligent technologies, prompting researchers and (industry) practitioners to reflect on the challenges and complexities involved in understanding the (potential) users of the technologies they develop. In this chapter, we provide an overv...
Information Retrieval (IR) remains an active, fast-paced area of research. However, most advances in IR have predominantly benefited the so-called “classical” users, e.g., English-speaking adults. We envision IR4U2as a forum to spotlight efforts that, while sparse, consider diverse, and often understudied, user groups when designing, developing, as...
Mutual comprehension is a crucial component that makes a conversation
succeed. While it can be easily reached through the cooperation of the parties
in human-human dialogues, such cooperation is often lacking in humancomputer
interaction due to technical problems, leading to broken conversations.
Our goal is to work towards an effective detection o...
Tourists spend a lot of effort in planning itineraries when organizing a trip. This is a complex activity that involves selecting the places to visit and dealing with a number of temporal issues to generate a schedule for the visit. In the paper we propose an architecture for a recommender that suggests personalized tourist itineraries and a person...
In this paper we propose an approach that combines genetic algorithms and temporal constraint satisfaction for generating personalized tourist itineraries. Not only does the personalization process take into account user preferences about the places to visit but also a number of temporal constraints (e.g., opening hours, time for visiting each plac...
Climate crisis has become one of the main challenges of the 21st century. However, there appears to be a lack of awareness among individuals regarding the impact of our daily routines on the environment.
Virtual Reality has shown to be an effective technology to virtually bring people to emotional scenarios, such as, in this case, a dystopian futur...
Field trips enrich learning programs with out-of-school activities that can bring gains in students’ academic content knowledge and personal growth. However, they are a source of anxiety for teachers because of the bureaucracy, pedagogy, etc., risks they imply. To address this issue, we propose FieldTripOrganizer, a field trip planner based on the...
To enhance food quality and value, transparent traceability systems, also proofed by authentication methods, are used to give information about the product from the primary production stages to the selling point. Nowadays, information is accessed in multi- or omni- channel (websites, mail, app, social media). Data analytics and Artificial Intellige...
People have different interests and cognitive capabilities that should be taken into account when developing technological support for cultural heritage exploration. In this project, we aim to help people with autism to plan a tourist trip by taking into account their interests and their cognitive skills. We plan to personalize the suggestion of to...
In this paper, we report on three experiments we have carried out in the context of the EMPATHY project, with the aim of helping users make better configuration choices in a smart home environment, and discuss our results. We found that there are psychological traits, such as Need for Cognition, which influence the way individuals tend to use recom...
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...
Autism is characterized by peculiar sensory processing. The sensory features of a place may have a crucial impact on the decision a person with autism makes when choosing what to visit in a tourist experience. We present a map-based mobile app, conceived for people with mid to high-functioning autism, which exploits sensory features of places to fi...
Planning an itinerary is a complex activity, which includes the choice of a few places to see, coupled with information on timing, transferring methods and related activities. Intelligent tools such as recommender systems have been used in order to support these activities. While decisions regarding the type of a trip to undertake are strongly infl...
The ACM Hypertext conference is a premium venue for peer-reviewed research on hypertext theory, systems, and applications. It is concerned with all aspects of modern hypertext research including social media, semantic web, dynamic and computed hypertext and hypermedia as well as narrative systems and applications.
Hypertext 2022 was held in Barcelo...
A social robot is an autonomous robot that interact with people by engaging in social emotive behaviors, skills, capacities, and rules attached to its collaborative role. In order to achieve these goals we believe that modeling the interaction with the user and adapt the robot behavior to the user herself are fundamental for its social role. This p...
While recommendations can be considered useful for any user, how users reacts to a recommendation depends on their specific features.Our solution: to offer non-personalized/personalized recommendations i.e. adapting
the quantity and timing of recommendation
the need of explanations and of which details
to user features
skills
habits and goals (ener...
Personality traits such as Need for Cognition, Locus of Control, Mindset and Self-efficacy could impact the perception, acceptance and appreciation of recommendations provided to support configuration tasks in the End User Development (EUD) context. In this paper we describe the user model services we have developed to measure such traits. These se...
Nowadays, many people suffer from depression, anxiety disorder, stress and bad emotions. Most of the times, the causes are a chaotic lifestyle, stressful jobs and activities, wrong habits and a permanent sense of uncertainty. Therefore, well-being plays an increasingly important role in people’s lives, as it can help them to prevent chronic disease...
Negative information plays an important role in the way we express our preferences and desires. However, it has not received the same attention as positive feedback in recommender systems. Here we show how negative user preferences can be exploited to generate recommendations. We rely on a logical semantics for the recommendation process introduced...
When suggesting Points of Interest (PoIs) to people with autism spectrum disorders, we must take into account that they have idiosyncratic sensory aversions to noise, brightness and other features that influence the way they perceive places. Therefore, recommender systems must deal with these aspects. However, the retrieval of sensory data about Po...
When suggesting Points of Interest (PoIs) to people with autism spectrum disorders, we must take into account that they have idiosyncratic sensory aversions to noise, brightness and other features that influence the way they perceive places. Therefore, recommender systems must deal with these aspects. However, the retrieval of sensory data about Po...
The suggestion of Points of Interest (PoIs) to people with autism spectrum disorders challenges the research about recommender systems by introducing an explicit need to consider both user preferences and aversions in item evaluation. The reason is that autistic users' perception of places is influenced by sensory aversions, which can cause stress...
This paper presents our first attempt to integrate user modeling features in social and affective robots. We propose a cloud-based architecture for modeling the user-robot interaction in order to re-use the approach with different kind of social robots.
In recent years conversation has become a key channel for human-computer interaction. Dialogue personalization could result in an important aspect, making sense of users' features when engaged in a conversation with a machine. A feature that has not been properly taken into account is the user's mental model, a crucial aspect since it determines us...
The PIUMA app aims at allowing users with autism to explore their city, finding new places that can be interesting for them but at the same time do not annoy them. Users can navigate the city through an interactive map that is both personalized and crowdsourced.
Nowadays, most interactive social systems allow users to react to their contents and exploit user reactions to provide intelligent behaviours, such as adaptation or recommendation. Therefore, carefully understanding and designing the user/system dialogue that revolves around reaction provisioning is a crucial aspect. In this paper, we introduce the...
One of the common traits of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is the inclination to perceive unknown situations and environments as a source of stress and anxiety. It is common for them to tend to avoid novel experiences -including traveling to new places- and therefore an environments like an airport can be overwhelming. Virtual Real...
In a previous work we introduced a classification of types of intelligence in smart physical objects, discussing how they can be taken into account when designing an object. In a later one we focused on a specific task – interactive adaptive support and recommendation to people — and we analyzed in detail the design of smart objects performing this...
In this paper we study whether visualizations based on color maps can encourage the intuitive interpretation of detailed descriptions, as the ones proposed in the formal model UPRISE, designed to ana- lyze interactive system components, such as reaction tools, which allow users to provide reactions. We carried out a between-subjects experiment wher...
The aim of this paper is to provide logical foundations for knowledge-based recommender systems, for which, unlike other problem solving tasks, a comprehensive formalization is not yet available. This goal is justified by the need to compare recommenders based on the way they use knowledge to generate recommendations and, consequently, on the under...
Cultural Heritage exploration is interesting for the development of
inclusive tourist guides because it exposes visitors to different types
of challenges, from steering content recommendation to visitors’
interests and cognitive capabilities, to the suggestion of places
that can be effectively reached and visited under different types of
constraint...
People with autism have idiosyncratic sensory experiences, which may impact on how they live the “spaces” of their everyday life. Starting from an investigation of their conception and experience of “secure places,” we defined a series of user requirements for designing technology that supports their everyday movements in the urban environment. On...
The suggestion of Points of Interest to people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) challenges recommender systems research because these users' perception of places is influenced by idiosyncratic sensory aversions which can mine their experience by causing stress and anxiety. Therefore, managing individual preferences is not enough to provide these...
A social robot is an autonomous robot that interact with people by engaging in social emotive behaviors, skills, capacities, and rules attached to its collaborative role. In order to achieve these goals we believe that modeling the interaction with the user and adapt the robot behavior to the user herself are fundamental for its social role. This p...
The crowdsourcing paradigm applied to the urban environment (i.e., people while moving can provide data from different places) may play a fundamental role in transforming users in significant actors of the places in which they live. In the last years, several crowdsourcing services have been developed to allow citizens to collaborate, by collecting...
Recommender systems (RSs) are systems that produce individualized recommendations as output or drive the user in a personalized way to interesting or useful objects in a space of possible options. Recently, RSs emerged as an effective support for decision making. However, when people make decisions, they usually take into account different and ofte...
Over the last few years, user modeling scenery is changing. With the recent advancements in ubiquitous and wearables technologies, the amount and type of data that can be gathered about users and used to build user models is expanding. User Model can now be enriched with data regarding different aspects of people’s everyday lives. All these changes...
Mobile applications have a great potential in making everyday environments more accessible from the cognitive point of view, allowing neurodiverse people, such as individuals with autism, dementia, or ADHD, to gain independency and find continuous support. This workshop will discuss the main technological, methodological, theoretical and design iss...
This paper describes the preliminary results of a project aimed to support people with autism in finding city places that match their "sensorial" preferences and aversions. Through a participatory design approach, we designed an interactive map that collects sensorial data about the urban environment exploiting crowdsourcing mechanisms.
The crowdsourcing paradigm (i.e., people while moving provide data from different places) can play a fundamental role in transforming users in significant actors in society. In the last years, several crowdsourcing services have been developed to allow citizens to collaborate collecting data about urban accessibility, but focusing mainly on physica...
Gamification is now a well-established technique in Human-Computer Interaction. However, research on gamification still faces a variety of empirical and theoretical challenges. Firstly, studies of gamified systems typically focus narrowly on understanding individuals. short-term interactions with the system, ignoring more difficult to measure outco...
In this paper we point out some relevant issues in relation to privacy when providing holistic recommendations. We emphasize that a holistic recommender should be fair, explainable and privacy-preserving to ensure the ethicality of the recommendation process. Further, we point out relevant research questions that should be addressed in the future,...
IoT enables the worldwide connection of heterogeneous things or objects, which can hence interact with each other and cooperate with their neighbors to reach common goals, by using different communication technologies and communication protocol standards. IoT and related technologies can increase or reduce the gap among people. In this respect, thi...
This paper is about characterizing intelligence in Smart Physical Objects, i.e., objects based on the tight and seamless integration of a physical and a digital counterpart. The design of these objects gives rise to new opportunities but requires taking into account a number of dimensions that contribute to smartness. In our view, supported by cons...
In this article, we describe a hybrid recommender system (RS) in the artistic and cultural heritage area, which takes into account the activities on social media performed by the target user and her friends, and takes advantage of linked open data (LOD) sources. Concretely, the proposed RS (1) extracts information from Facebook by analyzing content...
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the UMAP 2019 Workshop on Explainable and Holisitic User Modeling (ExHUM). Our workshop took inspiration from the analysis of the recent Web dynamics: according to a recent claim by IBM, 90% of the data available today have been created in the last two years. Such an exponential growth of personal informat...
Over the years, the relationship between technology and people with autism has been framed mainly in a medical model, where technology is primarily aimed at mitigating deficits and providing helps to overcome limitations. This has yielded a variety of Human-Computer Interaction designs addressed to improve the autistic individuals’ daily tasks and...
Similarity is one of the most straightforward ways to relate objects and guide the human perception of the world. It has an important role in many areas, such as Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Semantic Web and Recommender Systems. To help applications in these areas achieve satisfying results when finding similar concepts, it i...
Human-computer interaction is progressively shifting towards natural language communication, determining the rise of conversational agents. In the context of ubiquitous computing, the opportunities for interacting with new services and systems in a conversational manner are increasing and, nowadays, it is common to talk to home assistants to intera...
In this article, the authors aim at finding a way to effectively communicate situations of risk related to work safety, by catching workers'attention without interrupting their main task. They designed a multimodal alarm solution specifically conceived for a biomedical lab, where workers might be intoxicated due to the possible leak of reagents or...
This paper presents a novel personalized service to support people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in their daily movements within urban environments. It aims at helping them in managing anxiety and stress originated by routine breakdowns and unfamiliar situations, improving their autonomy. In particular, we provide an interactive map that is i...
In this paper we introduce the concept of holistic recommendations, namely a set of suggestions generated by exploiting a more comprehensive representation of the user that relies on the personal information coming from different heterogeneous data sources (e.g., social networks, wristbands, smartphones, etc.) and considers the diverse relations an...
This paper presents a personalized interactive map aimed at supporting people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in their daily transfers within urban environments. To this end, it aims to model a "complete" representation of the ASD individual by merging a variety of information in a unique user model. Moreover, it exploits crowdsourcing mechanis...
Thanks to the advancements in ubiquitous and wearable technologies, Personal Informatics (PI) systems can now reach a larger audience of users. However, it is not still clear whether this kind of tool can fit the needs of their daily lives. Our research aims at identifying specific barriers that may prevent the widespread adoption of PI and finding...
In recent years, we witnessed the spreading of a plethora of wearable and mobile technologies allowing for a continuous and “transparent” gathering of personal data [...]
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the UMAP 2018 HUM (Holistic User Modeling) Workshop. According to a recent claim by IBM, 90% of the data available today have been created in the last two years. This exponential growth of online information has given new life to research in the area of user modeling and personalization, since information...
In recent years, User Modeling (UM) scenery is changing. With the recent advancements in wearable and mobile technologies, the amount and type of data that can be gathered about users and employed to build User Models is rapidly expanding. UM can now be enriched with data regarding different aspects of people's daily lives and is likely to deliver...
Recommenders have proven to be useful means to support people in their activities and in making decisions. They evolved from online recommenders to context-aware and ubiquitous recommenders. Moving forward along this line, the paper introduces the new emerging class of smart physical recommenders: context-aware recommender systems that are embedded...
Quantified Self (QS) field needs to start thinking of how situated needs may affect the use of self-tracking technologies. In this workshop we will focus on the idiosyncrasies of specific categories of users.
This paper presents an ongoing project, PIUMA, Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Autism, with the aim to help people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) move and live within cities.
This paper presents the preliminary results of PIUMA project, Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Autism, which aims at tracking personal movements of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to support them in their everyday life.
Consumption practices show a strong presence of crystallised social understandings, organising rules and permanent ways of acting that prevent individuals from changing towards more sustainable habits. Over the years, human–computer interaction research tried to help people engage in sustainable lifestyles promoting the health of the Earth. However...
This brief introduction begins with an overview of the types of research that are relevant to the special issue on Big Personal Data in Interactive Intelligent Systems. The overarching question is: How can big personal data be collected, analyzed, and exploited so as to provide new or improved forms of interaction with intelligent systems, and what...
The importance of user modeling and personalization is taken for granted in several scenarios. According to this widespread paradigm, each user can be modeled through some (explicitly or implicitly gathered) information about her knowledge or about her preferences, in order to adapt the behavior of a generic intelligent system to her specific chara...
Many websites allow users to rate items and share their ratings with others, for social or personalisation purposes. In recommender systems in particular, personalised suggestions are generated by predicting ratings for items that users are unaware of, based on the ratings users provided for other items. Explicit user ratings are collected by means...
This paper outlines the roadmap and the preliminary results of an interactive systems aimed at providing interactive urban maps tailored to people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It aims at involving ASDs in the design process to produce personalized services that can support their daily movements and task management, improving their autonomy...