Maria Francesca Costabile

• Professor (Full) at University of Bari Aldo Moro

The rapid growth in interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a significant driver of research and business activities in recent years. This raises new critical issues, particularly concerning interaction with AI systems. This article first presents a survey that identifies the primary issues addressed in Human-Centered AI (HCAI), focusing...

Remote usability testing is performed by evaluators who are in different physical locations from the participants (synchronous remote testing) and possibly operating at different times (asynchronous remote testing). The tools developed in recent years to support remote tests exploit web technology based on HTML5 and JavaScript ES6 and thus enable p...

Phishing, the deceptive act of stealing personal and sensitive information by sending messages that seem to come from trusted entities, is one of the most widespread and effective cyberattacks. Automated defensive techniques against these attacks have been widely investigated. These solutions often exploit AI-based systems that, when a suspect webs...

Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in digital communication. It is a type of cyber attack often successful because users are not aware of their vulnerabilities or unable to understand the risks. This article presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) conducted to draw...

This paper presents an IoT-based game for cultural sites, Magic Torch, which aims to improve the visitors User eXperiences. It enables tangible interaction with ’smart’ artifacts that engage visitors and encourage their attention. In this paper, we focus on the design and development of the IoT devices involved in the games, illustrating the design...

This demo presents SERENE, a Web platform for the UX semi-automatic evaluation of websites. It exploits Artificial Intelligence to predict visitors’ emotions starting from their interaction logs. The predicted emotions are shown by interactive heatmaps overlapped to the webpage to be analyzed. The concentration of negative emotions in a specific ar...

Phishing, the deceptive act of stealing personal and sensitive information by sending messages that seem to come from trusted entities, is one of the most widespread and effective cyberattacks. Automated defensive techniques against these attacks have been widely investigated. These solutions often exploit AI-based systems that, when a suspect webs...

Although User eXperience (UX) is widely acknowledged as an important aspect of software products, its evaluation is often neglected during the development of most software products, primarily because developers think that it is resource-demanding and complain about the fact that is scarcely automated. Various attempts have been made to develop tool...

This paper addresses the problem of supporting public decision makers in the data analysis of the territory they are responsible for. Most of the Italian territory consists of the so-called inner areas, which are primarily rural areas usually far from main centers that provide education, health and mobility services. A project that analyzes inner a...

Digital technologies and social networks offer several possibilities for improving the quality of life in Smart Cities. Citizens are willing to contribute to the efficiency of services that Smart Cities offer by reporting through different channels, such as phone/fax, front office, website, mobile app, sensors, several problems they observe in the...

Daily experiences in working with various types of computer systems show that, despite the offered functionalities, users have many difficulties, which affect their overall User eXperience (UX). The UX focus is on aesthetics, emotions and social involvement, but usability has a great influence on UX. Usability evaluation is acknowledged as a fundam...

This paper reports on an on-going work that investigates the use of visualization techniques to help evaluators discovering usability problems by visualizing data collected during usability tests of web sites. Two visualization techniques are described and some results of the evaluation study that compared the two techniques are provided.

The pervasiveness of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is commonly used to create domestic ambient to support people daily life. In this paper we explore how IoT devices can be used in the smart home to administer the therapy to children with speech disorders. The speech therapist manages and controls patients’ therapies by using End-User Developmen...

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...

In Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), Internet of Things (IoT) technology is exploited to equip living environments with smart objects that communicate with the outside world in an intelligent and goal-oriented manner and can support the occupants’ activities. Currently, providing such objects with new capabilities requires several programming efforts....

We propose to create a system that, by exploiting the possibilities provided by the Internet of Things (IoT), offers a cheap and affordable solution to prevent and control health problems of people, especially elderly, living in rural villages, where assessing good health facilities is a major concern. The system consists of a heterogeneous combina...

Over the years, interaction design has become increasingly complex due to the evolution of end users of interactive systems. Approaches such as user-centered design (UCD), which proved effective in the creation of usable interactive systems, have to deal with this evolution. As HCI researchers working at the design of interactive systems in several...

In the framework of the AVI 2018 Conference, the interuniversity center ECONA has organized a thematic workshop on "Digital Interaction: where are we going?". Six contributions from the ECONA members investigate different perspectives around this thematic.

Several Planning Support Systems (PSS) have been developed so far, but their uptake in planning practice remains low. The analysis of the literature shows that one major factors for the limited use of PSS is the mismatch between PSS functionality (as well as the way it is provided through the PSS user interface) and what planners expect. This motiv...

Meta-design has been proposed as a model to design systems able to support End-User Development (EUD). Meta-design means “design for designers.” Differently than in traditional design, professional developers do not directly create a final application, but they build software environments thorough which non-technical end users, acting as co-designe...

Developing interactive systems to access and manipulate data is a very tough task. In particular, the development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most time-consuming activities in the software lifecycle. This is even more demanding when data have to be retrieved by accessing flexibly different online resources. Indeed, software development i...

Planning Support Systems (PSS) are computer-based tools that assist professionals in land use planning activities. Although several researchers acknowledge the importance of such tools in planning practice, PSS use is limited due to their poor fit to users’ needs and expectations as well as to their low usability. This article presents a study carr...

Information and communication technologies have a great potential to enhance personal experience in cultural heritage sites. Our research in the Cultural Heritage (CH) aims to foster a wider appreciation of archaeology by offering tools able to engage the general public and to increase awareness of the importance of CH. In this paper we discuss how...

The EFESTO platform allows the creation of interactive workspaces supporting end users in the exploration and seamless composition of heterogeneous data sources. By means of a visual paradigm implemented within a Web composition environment, the end users dynamically create "live" mashups where relevant information, extracted from different types o...

Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are distributed and dynamic software environments that foster the collaboration of people from different disciplines by supporting the accomplishment of complex research tasks. VREs lack efficient and effective user interfaces able to satisfy the needs of the different types of people collaborating in performing...

AVI 2016 is the 13th edition of the International Working Conferences on Advanced Visual Interfaces, held in Bari, Italy, during June 7-10 2016. Since 1992, the AVI conferences are held every two years and have become well appreciated by the international community, attracting experts with a broad range of backgrounds, coming from all over the worl...

Abstract Collaboration is acknowledged as a key element of learning. Thus, it is valuable to develop Information and Communication Technology applications that, implemented on proper devices, can support collaborative learning. Large multi-touch displays appear to encourage collaboration by offering users a shared environment to act upon. However,...

Previous research on Planning Support Systems (PSS) showed that low usability of these computer-based tools is one of the reasons why they are not widely used by planning professionals. Few studies for evaluating PSS usability are performed, possibly because developers do not regard it as their task, do not have enough skills to conduct them, and h...

The huge amount of heterogeneous content available nowadays on the Web pushes towards approaches and tools to allow people, even non-technical ones, to retrieve, combine and manipulate such content, in order to satisfy their knowledge needs. In this paper we illustrate how composition technologies enable teacher and students to create, use and shar...

INTERACT is among the world’s top conferences in Human-Computer Interaction. Starting with the first INTERACT conference in 1990, this conference series has been organised under the aegis of the Technical Committee 13 on Human-Computer Interaction of the UNESCO International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). This committee aims at devel...

Distributed Interactive Workspaces (DIWs) are interactive environments, accessible through different devices, where end users create new content by exploring and aggregating data retrieved from distributed resources in the Web, tailor this content to their own personal needs, use it on different devices, and possibly share and co-create it with oth...

Recent advances in computing devices push researchers to envision new interaction modalities that go beyond traditional mouse and keyboard input. Typical examples are large displays for which researchers hope to create more "natural" means of interaction by using human gestures and body movements as input. In this article, we reflect about this goa...

Objective The overall objective of the research work presented in this article is to investigate models, methods and architectures to replace fixed, pre-packaged applications with flexible composition environments that make interactive environments “emerge” at run-time, based on composition actions performed by non-technical users. The approach aim...

There is a huge and ever increasing amount of data sources available on the Web, which provide content through programmatic interfaces. Unfortunately, such data sources are accessible only through programming and therefore it is difficult for non-technical users to take advantage of such enormous data assets. The need therefore arises for paradigms...

The availability of different methods (and models) that support the design and evaluation of interactive systems raises a question about the transferability of such methods between application sectors and domains. The transferability refers to the selection and application of a method in a development context, qualifying it for the interactive syst...

A current trend in the design of modern interactive systems is to let people create new value by integrating heterogeneous resources to fit their contextual needs. In this paper, we briefly illustrate our approach for the lightweight integration of service-based and situational work-spaces, pervasively accessible and sharable through a variety of d...

The revolutionary advances of Information and Communication Technology push towards the evolution of end users from passive information consumers to information producers. In many contexts, end users are increasingly willing to manipulate content they get from various resources in the Web, move it across the boundaries of their original application...

Since the ‘80s, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers have performed a lot of work to identify principles, techniques, and methodologies that can support design, evaluation and implementation of interactive systems that fulfill needs and expectations of their users. This chapter discusses con- cepts, such as usability and user experience, wh...

The importance of adopting usability engineering methods in software development is eventually recognized by an increasing number of companies. However, several studies show that, in spite of the declared awareness of usability as an important software quality and the benefits reported in the literature, many companies still neglect in their develo...

The efforts of addressing user experience (UX) in product development keep growing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of workshops and conferences bringing together academics and practitioners, who aim at creating interactive software able to satisfy their users. This special issue focuses on “Interplay between User Experience Evaluation and Sof...

This paper illustrates our approach to enhance the visit experience of archeological parks. It exploits composition technologies, End-User Development and participatory design approaches, in order to allow different stakeholders to create, use and share Personal Information Spaces. Heterogeneous content can be combined and manipulated to satisfy di...

Current information and communication technology (ICT) has the potential to bring further changes to education. New learning techniques must be identified to take advantage of recent technological tools, such as smartphones, multimodal interfaces, multi-touch displays, etc. Game-based techniques that capitalize on ICT have proven to be very valuabl...

The efforts of addressing user experience (UX) in product development keeps growing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of workshops and conferences bringing together academics and practitioners, who aim at creating interactive software able to satisfy their users. Unfortunately, human-centred design and methods addressing usability and UX are al...

An emerging need to make software systems flexible to increase their ability to support a large variety of tasks is highlighted in recent works published in the literature. The idea is to replace fixed, pre-packaged applications with elastic composition environments that, thanks to a separation among data, functions and presentations, make interact...

Large interactive displays are increasingly used in public spaces. Yet, it is still a challenge to understand how people behave when faced with such displays in their real life, not only when they are used for entertainment (or advertising), but also when they mediate more purposeful tasks. Do people feel shy? Are they willing to interact? Are they...

In our Age of exponential technological advance, recent developments are determining an evolution of end users from passive information consumers into information producers. Users are increasingly willing and, indeed, determined to shape the software they use to tailor it to their own needs. Based on a brief review of research activities we perform...

The advent on the market of multi-touch devices has prompted studies that investigate the use of such devices in learning domain, demonstrating that games are an effective way of exploiting these new technologies that allow pupils to achieve informal learning and foster collaboration during their educational activities. We defined an educational fo...

Developing visual tools that support data analysis in a specific application domain requires a careful investigation in order to understand needs and expectations of people who will use such tools. The domain experts addressed in this paper are chemists specialized in environmental data analysis. Their main activity is to detect and monitor chemica...

Cultural heritage provides a great legacy that more and more people should experience and appreciate. Information and communication technologies may contribute to increasing awareness in cultural heritage. In the last few years we have developed several applications aimed at supporting visits to cultural heritage sites. Such applications depends ve...

Pervasive games have been proposed as a suitable way to support learning, especially in places rich in information, as for example museums and cultural heritage sites. This paper reports on the work performed to identify guidelines that help designers in developing games able to provide an effective learning experience in such contexts. Such guidel...

Different researchers have focused on complementary aspects of end-user development. For example, some people work on tool-building while others explore different models for participatory programming. This workshop will focus discussion on identifying opportunities for collaboration, particularly between European and American research groups. Submi...

Mass customization refers to the increase in variety and customization of the manufactured products and services. It is now economically feasible thanks to the availability of computer-aided manufacturing systems, which allow people to customize standard products, and to Internet, through which many online retailers now operate, thus eliminating th...

Evaluating e-learning systems is a complex activity which requires considerations of several criteria addressing quality in use as well as educational quality. Heuristic evaluation is a widespread method for usability evaluation, yet its output is often prone to subjective variability, primarily due to the generality of many heuristics. This paper...

Collaborative design involving end users has emerged as a response to the needs felt by various organizations of adapting software to specific environments and users. During time, users and environments evolve; this is another reason why software has to be modified. Different stakeholders, including consultants, designers internal to the organizati...

The importance of usability engineering in software development is acknowledged by an increasing number of software organizations. This paper reports from a survey of the practical impact of usability engineering in software development organizations. The survey was conducted in Southern Italy, replicating one conducted in Northern Denmark three ye...

In this paper we present the "Learning4All" (L4ALL) project, which has the aim of developing knowledge about how technology and pedagogy influence the quality of educational experiences. Our approach is empirical rather than theoretical: instead of scavenging literature, we collect credible evidence from Italian teachers on the job who create innov...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Symposium on End-User Development, IS-EUD 2011, held in Torre Canne, Italy, in June 2011. The 14 long papers and 21 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. In addition the volume contains 2 keynote speeches, 14 doctoral consortia...

Understanding how technology, coupled with skillful pedagogical solutions, can help to innovate and improve learning at school is the main goal of the “Learning for All” (L4A) research project. The combination of educational games and advanced technology has the potentiality of arousing pupils’ attention, also engaging them in learning activities w...

Today’s mobile devices, like smartphones and PDAs are often used as gaming instruments. A new genre that is rapidly proliferating is that of location based games, that use the positioning capabilities of the devices and other available locative media in the game. These new games expand in space and time and often involve large numbers of players, l...

ICT technologies have a great potential not only for preserving and increasing awareness about cultural heritage, but also for allowing people to better experience this huge legacy. Various application tools have already been developed which provide different types of multimedia resources, such as 3D representations of objects and places, videos, g...

Cultural heritage assets keep alive the history of a territory and of its inhabitants. Several systems have been developed to support people during their visits to historical sites and museums, with the goal of improving the overall user experience. In many cases, people travelling together would appreciate the possibility of collaborating in gathe...

The use of gameplay has been shown to be an excellent educational tool, especially if such games are supported by innovative and engaging technologies. This paper presents two new games implemented on a large multitouch screen, designed to support young students learning about historical sites like archaeological parks during school visits. Student...

End-User Development (EUD) has traditionally been focusing on non-programmers tailoring or even creating software artifacts, often in organizational context. Some examples of successful EUD concepts include spreadsheet and word processing macros and the specification of e-mail filters by means of rules. Recent developments, such as Web 2.0 and Sema...

Explore! is designed to be used in a wider set of historical sites. The game content historical information, 3-D reconstructions and sounds is provided by XML files and can be authored in numerous ways and adapted to different sites. A great advantage of Explore!, which makes it very attractive for use in archaeological parks across Italy with very...

This paper analyzes how User-Centred Design (UCD) has been carried out in the creation of a web-based system, whose aim is monitoring air quality for sustainable industrial development. This distributed multimedia system has been commissioned by the Puglia region and it is used primarily by industries and regional government experts. Several lesson...

Scheduling staff shift work in a hospital ward is a well-known problem in the operation research field but, as such, it is very often studied from the algorithmic point of view and seldom from the human-computer interaction perspective. In most cases, the automatic solutions that operations research may provide do not satisfy the involved people. A...

Interaction with 3D Virtual Environments has always suffered from a lack of widely available and low cost input devices. Recently, thanks to the diffusion of gaming systems such as the Microsoft XBox 360 or the Nintendo Wii, new input devices are on the market at a relatively cheap price. This paper describes a study whose aim is to compare input d...

The MuMoWOz (MultiModal Wizard of Oz) tool presented in this paper permits to conduct Wizard of Oz user studies. The significant features of MuMoWOz are the possibility to easily adapt it to new simulation scenarios and an architecture that allows HCI researchers to perform studies in mobile multimodal settings. The simulation of two scenarios rela...

Traditional visits to archaeological parks, which are usually organized by schools, tend to generate little interest in young students, especially when they are faced with the ruins of ancient settlements whose current appearance no longer reflects their initial purpose. We have designed Explore!, an m-learning system which allows students to visit...

Explore! is an m-learning system that combining e-learning and mobile computing allows middle school students to interact with learning materials in different ways while playing a game in an archaeological park. Design is based on user-centred and participatory approaches. The evaluation of Explore! through systematic field studies has shown that i...

Nowadays very different people use computer systems for their daily working activities, but also for fun and entertainment or only to satisfy their information needs. Designers are doing their best to create computer systems that work as end users expect, but it must be honestly admitted that they often fail and end users have all rights to complai...

Interaction design of mobile systems is a complex activity because it requires considering new usability and user experience aspects in order to exploit the peculiar characteristics of mobile devices, such as their pervasive and ubiquitous nature. This paper discusses issues about designing, developing and evaluating mobile systems. Italy has a ric...

M-learning the combination of e-learn- ling with mobile technologies captures the very nature of e-learning by providing users with independence from the constraints of time and location.1 To exploit the potential of mobile technologies for learning, researchers must define new teaching and learning techniques.2 The Explore! m-learning system imple...

Explore! is an m-learning system that combining e-learning and mobile computing allows middle school students to interact with learning materials in different ways while playing a game in an archaeological park. Design is based on user-centred and participatory approaches. The evaluation of Explore! through systematic field studies has shown that i...

Nowadays, users are evolving from consumers of content and tools to producers of them, also becoming co-designer of their tools and content. In this paper we report on a methodology that supports this evolution; it derives from our experience in participatory design projects to develop multimedia systems to be used by professional people in their w...

Mobile context-aware computing aims at providing services that are optimally adapted to the situation in which a given human actor is. An open problem is that not all mobile services need contextual information at the same level of abstraction, or care for all aspects of the user's situation. It is therefore impossible to create a unique context mo...

The ever increasing use of interactive software systems and the evolution of the World Wide Web into the so-called Web 2.0 determines the rise of new roles for users, who evolve from information consumers to information producers. The distinction between users and designers becomes fuzzy. Users are increasingly involved in the design and developmen...

The widespread use of personal software systems and the boom of the so-called Web 2.0 is erasing the distinctions between those who create software products and those who use or consume them. End users are increasingly involved in the design and development of the tools they use. Unfortunately, there is a high incidence of errors in applications de...

The paper presents a novel participatory approach to the design of customized and tailorable visual interactive systems; it includes end users, as domain experts, in the design team. A design method is described, which leads to two different visual specifications, one suitable for end users and the other suitable for software engineers. It is also...

This paper reports the experimental studies we have performed to evaluate Explore!, an m-learning system that supports middle school students during a visit to an archaeological park. It exploits a learning technique called excursion-game, whose aim is to help students to acquire historical notions while playing and to make archaeological visits mo...

End-user development means the active participation of end users in the software development process. In this perspective, tasks that are traditionally performed by professional software developers at design time are transferred to end users at use time. This creates a new challenge for software engineers: designing software systems that can be evo...