Giulio Jacucci

University of Helsinki | HY · Department of Computer Science

Researchers increasingly explore deploying brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) for able-bodied users, with the motivation of accessing mental states more directly than allowed by existing body-mediated interaction. This motivation seems to contradict the long-standing HCI emphasis on embodiment, namely the general claim that the body is crucial for co...

Introduction Gestational diabetes (GDM) causes various adverse short-term and long-term consequences for the mother and child, and its incidence is increasing globally. So far, the most promising digital health interventions for GDM management have involved healthcare professionals to provide guidance and feedback. The principal aim of this study i...

BACKGROUND Gestational diabetes (GDM) is an increasing health risk for pregnant women as well as their child. Telehealth interventions targeted to management of GDM have been shown to be effective, but they still have required work from health care professionals for providing guidance and feedback. Feedback from wearable sensors has been suggested...

Background Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is an increasing health risk for pregnant women as well as their children. Telehealth interventions targeted at the management of GDM have been shown to be effective, but they still require health care professionals for providing guidance and feedback. Feedback from wearable sensors has been suggested...

Background: Gestational diabetes (GDM) has considerable and increasing health effects as it raises both the mother's and the offspring's risk for short-and long-term health problems. GDM can usually be treated with a healthier lifestyle, such as appropriate dietary modifications and sufficient physical activity. Although telemedicine interventions...

Exploratory search starts with ill-defined goals and involves browsing, learning, and formulating new targets for search. To fluidly support such dynamic search behaviours, we focus on devising interactive visual facets (IVF) , visualising information facets to support user comprehension and control of the information space. We reviewed existing fa...

We study the effect of contextual information obtained from a user’s digital trace on Web search performance. Contextual information is modeled using Dirichlet–Hawkes processes (DHP) and used in augmenting Web search queries. The context is captured by monitoring all naturally occurring user behavior using continuous 24/7 recordings of the screen a...

One of the primary purposes of visualization is to assist users in discovering insights. While there has been much research in information visualization aiming at complex data transformation and novel presentation techniques, relatively little has been done to understand how users derive insights through interactive visualization of data. This pape...

BACKGROUND Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) has considerable and increasing health effects as it raises both the mother’s and offspring’s risk for short- and long-term health problems. GDM can usually be treated with a healthier lifestyle, such as appropriate dietary modifications and engaging insufficient physical activity. While telemedicine i...

Background: Gestational diabetes (GDM) has considerable and increasing health effects as it raises both the mother's and the offspring's risk for short- and long-term health problems. GDM can usually be treated with a healthier lifestyle, such as appropriate dietary modifications and sufficient physical activity. Although telemedicine intervention...

Researchers increasingly explore deploying brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for able-bodied users, with the motivation of accessing mental states more directly than allowed by existing body-mediated interaction. This motivation seems to contradict the long-standing HCI emphasis on embodiment, namely the general claim that the body is crucial for co...

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) has considerable and increasing health effects as it raises both the mother’s and offspring’s risk for short- and long-term health problems. GDM can usually be treated with a healthier lifestyle, such as appropriate dietary modifications and engaging insufficient physical activity. While telemedicine intervention...

The tendency to simulate the pain of others within our own sensorimotor systems is a vital component of empathy. However, this sensorimotor resonance is modulated by a multitude of social factors including similarity in bodily appearance, e.g. skin colour. The current study investigated whether increasing self-other similarity via virtual transfer...

Supplementary material for the publication "Increasing self–other similarity modulates ethnic bias in sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain". The material entails a supplementary method section, tables, and figures.

Recommender systems can support everyday digital tasks by retrieving and recommending useful information contextually. This is becoming increasingly relevant in services and operating systems. Previous research often focuses on specific recommendation tasks with data captured from interactions with an individual application. The quality of recommen...

Exploratory search starts with ill-defined goals and involves browsing, learning, and formulating new targets for search. To fluidly support such dynamic search behaviours, we focus on devising interactive visual facets (IVF), visualising information facets to support user comprehension and control of the information space. To do this, we reviewed...

Web searches often originate from conversations in which people engage before they perform a search. Therefore, conversations can be a valuable source of context with which to support the search process. We investigate whether spoken input from conversations can be used as a context to improve query auto-completion. We model the temporal dynamics o...

Digital tools for collocated synchronous communication, like backchannels and question management systems, are increasingly used in events and education to support interaction between performer(s) and audience. Discussions in the communication tool are prone to various unexpected interruptions which violate against the communication tools' original...

In a novel experimental setting, we augmented a variation of traditional compassion meditation with our custom-built VR environment for multiple concurrent users. The presence of another user’s avatar in shared virtual space supports social interactions and provides an active target for evoked compassion. The system incorporates respiration and bra...

This paper introduces a design framework for mixed reality urban exploration (MRUE), based on a concrete implementation in a historical city. The framework integrates different modalities, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and haptics-audio interfaces, as well as advanced features such as personalized recommendations, social exp...

In the past few years, collaborative robots (i.e., cobots) have been largely adopted within industrial manufacturing. Although robots can support companies and workers in carrying out complex activities and improving productivity, human factors related to cobot operators have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The present study aims to understan...

Interpersonal touch is critical for social-emotional development and presents a powerful modality for communicating emotions. Virtual agents of the future could capitalize on touch to establish social bonds with humans and facilitate cooperation in virtual reality (VR). We studied whether the emotional expression of a virtual agent would affect the...

Understanding the quality of insight has become increasingly important with the trend of allowing users to post comments during visual exploration, yet approaches for qualifying insight are rare. This paper presents a case study to investigate the possibility of characterizing the quality of insight via the interactions performed. To do this, we de...

Understanding the quality of insight has become increasingly important with the trend of allowing users to post comments during visual exploration, yet approaches for qualifying insight are rare. This paper presents a case study to investigate the possibility of characterizing the quality of insight via the interactions performed. To do this, we de...

With the advent of consumer grade virtual reality (VR) headsets and physiological measurement devices, new possibilities for mediated social interaction emerge enabling the immersion to environments where the visual features react to the users’ physiological activation. In this study, we investigated whether and how individual and interpersonally s...

The outcome of exploratory information retrieval is not only dependent on the effectiveness of individual responses to a set of queries, but also on relevant information retrieved during the entire exploratory search session. We study the effect of search assistance, operationalized as an interactive faceted query suggestion, for both whole‐session...

Motivational intensity has been previously linked to information processing. In particular, it has been argued that affects which are high in motivational intensity tend to narrow cognitive scope. A similar effect has been attributed to negative affect, which has been linked to narrowing of cognitive scope. In this paper, we investigated how these...

Despite advances in the past few decades in studying what kind of queries users input to search engines and how to suggest queries for the users, the fundamental question of what makes human cognition able to estimate goodness of query terms is largely unanswered. For example, a person searching information about "cats'' is able to choose query ter...

Nonverbal communication determines much of how we perceive explicit, verbal messages. Facial expressions and social touch, for example, influence affinity and conformity. To understand the interaction between nonverbal and verbal information, we studied how the psychophysiological time-course of semiotics—the decoding of the meaning of a message—is...

The current study was carried out to investigate users’ preferences for different input modalities (i.e., mouse or gaze) when involved in scientific information-seeking tasks. According to the task that they had to perform (i.e., abstract opening, gaze bookmarking, or keyword highlighting), participants were randomly assigned to three different con...

The term implicit interaction is often used to denote interactions that differ from traditional purposeful and attention demanding ways of interacting with computers. However, there is a lack of agreement about the term's precise meaning. This paper develops implicit interaction further as an analytic concept and identifies the methodological chall...

PeyeDF is a Portable Document Format (PDF) reader with eye tracking support, available as free and open source software. It is especially useful to researchers investigating reading and learning phenomena, as it integrates PDF reading-related behavioural data with gaze-related data. It is suitable for short and long-term research and supports multi...

Understanding users' search behavior has largely relied on the information available from search engine logs, which provide limited information about the contextual factors affecting users' behavior. Consequently, questions such as how users' intentions, task goals, and substances of the users' tasks affect search behavior, as well as what triggers...

The use of implicit relevance feedback from neurophysiology could deliver effortless information retrieval. However, both computing neurophysiological responses and retrieving documents are characterized by uncertainty due to noisy signals and incomplete or inconsistent representations of the data. We present the first-of-its-kind, fully integrated...

Nonverbal communication determines much of how we perceive explicit, verbal messages. Facial expressions and social touch, for example, influence affinity and conformity. To understand the interaction between non-verbal and verbal information, we studied how the psychophysiological time-course of decoding the meaning of a message – the semiotics –...

Locating places in cities is typically facilitated by handheld mobile devices, which draw the visual attention of the user on the screen of the device instead of the surroundings. In this research, we aim at strengthening the connection between people and their surroundings through enabling mid-air gestural interaction with real-world landmarks and...

In a novel experimental setting, we augmented a variation of traditional compassion meditation with our custom built VR environment for multiple concurrent users. The system incorporates respiration and brainwave based biofeedback that enables responsiveness to the shared physiological states of the users. The presence of another user's avatar in t...

This workshop will discuss how different multimedia applications and interaction techniques have been employed to support public sociality---from collocated interactions to social awareness and feeling of community. Participants will discuss recent work and join hands-on design activities to envision new ways for potential users to discover and lea...

Searching during conversations and social interactions is becoming increasingly common. Although searching could be helpful for solving arguments, building common ground, and reinforcing mutual assumptions, it can also cause interactional problems. Proactive search approaches can enrich conversations with additional information without neglecting t...

This workshop invites the CSCW community to explore hybrid events - large collocated events where technology is used to support audience participation. We argue that the technology landscape has changed since the early studies in CSCW towards this context. Therefore, the research foci must similarly change and focus on studying the practices or pro...

Despite the growth of personal digital information use, both in scale and application diversity, conventional user models are still reliant on limited user input data to improve a variety of services for specific applications and tasks. This trend toward increased application diversity renders it difficult for a system to generate inferences about...

Exploratory search requires the system to assist the user in comprehending the information space and expressing evolving search intents for iterative exploration and retrieval of information. We introduce interactive intent modeling, a technique that models a user’s evolving search intents and visualizes them as keywords for interaction. The user c...

During collaboration, individual users' capacity to maintain awareness, avoid duplicate work and prevent conflicts depends on the extent to which they are able to monitor the workspace. Existing access control models disregard this contextual information by managing access strictly based on who performs the action. As an alternative approach, we pr...

End-user development for the home has been gaining momentum in research. Previous works demonstrate feasibility and potential but there is a lack of analysis of the extent of technology needed and its impact on the diversity of activities that can be supported. We present a design exploration with a tangible end-user toolkit for programming smart t...

Motivation: Precision medicine requires the ability to predict the efficacies of different treatments for a given individual using high-dimensional genomic measurements. However, identifying predictive features remains a challenge when the sample size is small. Incorporating expert knowledge offers a promising approach to improve predictions, but...

In this paper we show that heart-rate based audio/sonification biofeedback (HRSB) can be used to facilitate emotion regulation during poker play. We report on a laboratory experiment (N=29) where participants play No Limit Texas Hold’em poker while hearing heartbeats synchronized with their actual heart-rate (biofeedback condition) or at steady pac...

We introduce the concept of hypercue, a complement to the hyperlink in the form of an interactive representation of real-world entities, e.g. persons, places, concepts, providing personalized access points to information. As a pendant to the hyperlink, hypercues create opportunities to flexibly discover, store and share information, organize one's...

Conversations among people involve solving disputes, building common ground, and reinforce mutual beliefs and assumptions. Conversations often require external information that can support these human activities. In this paper, we study how a spoken conversation can be supported by a proactive search agent that listens to the conversation, detects...

While ordinary touchscreen-based interfaces on urban explorer applications draw much of a user's attention onto the screen, visual and audio-haptic augmented reality interfaces have emerged as the two main streams for enabling direct focus on the surroundings. However, neither interface alone satisfies users in the highly dynamic urban environment....

Receiving a touch or smile increases compliance in natural face-to-face settings. It has been unclear, however, whether a virtual agent’s touch and smile also promote compliance or whether there are individual differences in proneness to nonverbal persuasion. Utilising a multimodal virtual reality, we investigated whether touch and smile promoted c...

Industrial applications can benefit considerably from the overwhelming amount of still growing resources such as websites, images, texts, and videos that the internet offers today. The resulting Big Data Problem does not only consist of handling this immense volume of data. Moreover, data needs to be processed, cleaned, and presented in a user-frie...

Collaborative and co-located information access is becoming increasingly common. However, fairly little attention has been devoted to the design of ubiquitous computing approaches for spontaneous exploration of large information spaces enabling co-located collaboration. We investigate whether an entity-based user interface provides a solution to su...

Previous work has shown that large high resolution displays (LHRDs) can enhance collaboration between users. As LHRDs allow free movement in front of the screen, an understanding of movement behavior is required to build successful interfaces for these devices. This paper presents Pac-Many; a multiplayer version of the classical computer game Pac-M...

The effects of bio-adaptation-based visual cues in conveying affective information was studied while conducting social meditation in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In a laboratory study, 22 dyads practiced a short duration, modified version of empathy-evoking compassion meditation. The immersive VR provided electroencephalography (EEG) -based...

We explore electroencephalography (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and electrocardiography (ECG) as valid sources to infer humor appraisal in a realistic environment. We report on an experiment in which 25 participants browsed a popular user-generated humorous content website while their physiological responses were recorded. We build predictiv...

Previous research investigated how to leverage the new type of social data available on the web, e.g., tags, ratings and reviews, in recommending and personalizing information. However, previous works mainly focused on predicting ratings using collaborative filtering or quantifying personalized ranking quality in simulations. As a consequence, the...

Geo-localized, mobile applications can simplify a tourist visit, making the relevant Point of Interests more easily and promptly discernible to users. At the same time, such solutions must avoid creating unfitting or rigid user profiles that impoverish the users' options instead of refining them. Currently, user profiles in recommender systems rely...

Background Dispersed biomedical databases limit user exploration to generate structured knowledge. Linked Data unifies data structures and makes the dispersed data easy to search across resources, but it lacks supporting human cognition to achieve insights. In addition, potential errors in the data are difficult to detect in their free formats. Dev...

We investigate to what extent it is possible to infer a user’s work tasks by digital activity monitoring and use the task models for proactive information retrieval. Ten participants volunteered for the study, in which their computer screen was monitored and related logs were recorded for 14 days. Corresponding diary entries were collected to provi...

Following recent advances in visual interfaces for search, we investigate how to visualize activity traces to support collaborative information-seeking. We implemented a prototype system that visualizes traces of three types of activities (queries typed, articles bookmarked, and interested keywords) on top of a recent visual search system. The curr...

We present a preliminary design study for utilizing eye tracking to support interacting with a multi-document visualization. Complex information seeking tasks can involve collection and comparison of multiple documents, resulting in long and sustained search sessions. The sustained and evolving nature of the session also provides the search interfa...

We demonstrate proactive information retrieval via screen surveillance. A user's digital activities are continuously monitored by capturing all content on a user's screen using optical character recognition. This includes all applications and services being exploited and relies on each individual user's computer usage, such as their Web browsing, e...

Background Dispersed biomedical databases limit user exploration to generate structured knowledge. Linked Data unifies data structures and makes the dispersed data easy to search across resources, but it lacks supporting human cognition to achieve insights. In addition, potential errors in the data are difficult to detect in their free formats. Dev...

The Interactions website (interactions.acm.org) hosts a stable of bloggers who share insights and observations on HCI, often challenging current practices. Each issue we'll publish selected posts from some of the leading voices in the field.

Online crowds can help infuse creativity into the design process, but traditional strategies for leveraging them, such as large-scale ideation platforms, require time and organizational effort in order to obtain results. We propose a new method for crowd-based ideation that simplifies the process by having smaller crowds join in-person ideators dur...

We explore the combination of above-surface sensing with eye tracking to facilitate concurrent interaction with multiple regions on touch screens. Conventional touch input relies on positional accuracy, thereby requiring tight visual monitoring of one's own motor action. In contrast, above-surface sensing and eye tracking provides information about...