Maria Angela Ferrario

Lancaster University | LU · School of Computing and Communications

When caring for patients with chronic conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), health care professionals (HCPs) rely on multiple data sources to make decisions. Collating and visualizing these data, for example, on clinical dashboards, holds the potential to support timely and informed decision-making. Most studies on data-s...

Sustained participation is critical to the success of digital citizen-science initiatives, yet much of the current literature focuses on mapping people’s motives to engage without considering the extent to which participation is sustained over time. We conducted a year-long experimental study (n=85) “in the wild” to explore the effects of human-val...

Digital technology is having a major impact on many areas of society, and there is equal opportunity for impact on science. This is particularly true in the environmental sciences as we seek to understand the complexities of the natural environment under climate change. This perspective presents the outcomes of a summit in this area, a unique cross...

This chapter explores co-production with community groups of innovative digital technologies designed to address challenging social issues. It presents lessons learned from the Catalyst project (http://www.catalystproject.org.uk), which carried out 13 such co-production projects over a three year period developing digital solutions in areas as dive...

This article argues that human values – such as responsibility, transparency, creativity, and equality – are heavily under-represented in software engineering methods. Based on experiences with real-world projects with not-for-profits, we explore how human values can be integrated into existing participatory agile practices. We propose new ways of...

The way people participate in decision making has radically changed over the last few decades. Technology has facilitated the sharing of knowledge, ideas and opinions across social structures and, has allowed grass-root initiatives to flourish. Participatory civic technology has helped local communities to embrace civic action on matters of shared...

Background: Human values, such as prestige, social justice, and financial success, influence software production decision-making processes. While their subjectivity makes some values difficult to measure, their impact on software motivates our research. Aim: To contribute to the scientific understanding and the empirical investigation of human valu...

New and emergent computing architectures and software engineering practices provide an opportunity for environmental models to be deployed more efficiently and democratically. In this paper we aim to capture the software engineering practices of environmental scientists, highlight opportunities for software engineering and work towards developing a...

Participatory sensing (PS) and citizen science hold promises for a genuinely interactive and inclusive citizen engagement in meaningful and sustained collection of data about social and environmental phenomena. Yet the underlying motivations for public engagement in PS remain still unclear particularly regarding the role of gamification, for which...

The Post-Truth Age is characterized by an information multiverse where truths are multiple and simultaneously manifest. Post-truth appeals to emotions and personal beliefs, and is often based on alternative facts. Truth, instead, sits at the center of scientific endeavor, which is based on observable and measurable evidence. Design is less concerne...

This paper presents a digital relay baton that connects long-distance runners with distributed online spectators. The baton broadcasts athletes’ live locative data to a social network and communicates back remote-crowd support through haptic and audible cheers. Our work takes an exploratory design approach to bring new insights into the design of r...

Whether it is in the form of software, system architecture or interface design, anything digital is inevitably affected by values: the organizational values of the project sponsor, the values of the research partners, and the values of each developer and designer. Some values (e.g. commercial success, academic prestige) are easier to quantify than...

There has been a market surge in both provision of and demand for fitness applications and sport wearables. These wearables often come equipped with highly sophisticated biometric data (e.g. heart rate) functionalities that make the capture and sharing of such biometric data increasingly common practice. A few research studies have considered the e...

Automated passive sensing applications and self-reported smart diaries seem to hold promise for the management of anxiety in autism and other mental health conditions. However, passive sensing often struggles with noisy data, ambiguous feedback and weak user agency over the device, whilst self-reporting relies on user-entered data which can be time...

The realization that software has a far reaching impact on politics, society and the environment is not new. However, only recently software impact has been explicitly described as `systemic' and framed around complex social problems such as sustainability. We argue that `wicked' social problems are consequences of the interplay between complex eco...

For many people living with conditions such as autism, anxiety manifests so powerfully it has a big impact on quality of life. By investigating the suitability of truly customizable wearable health devices we build on prior research that found each experience of anxiety in people with autism is unique, so 'one-suits all' solutions are not suitable....

Many studies have shown that crowd-support, such as cheering during sport events, can have a positive impact on athletes' performance. However, up until recently this support was only possible if the supporters and the athletes were geographically co-located. Can cheering be done remotely and would this be effective? In this paper we investigate th...

Many studies have shown that crowd-support, such as cheering during sport events, can have a positive impact on athletes' performance. However, up until recently this support was only possible if the supporters and the athletes were geographically co-located. Can cheering be done remotely and would this be effective? In this paper we investigate th...

In many parts of the world, the electricity supply industry makes the task of dealing with unpredictable spikes and dips in production and demand invisible to consumers, maintaining a seemingly unlimited supply. A future increase in reliance on time-variable renewable sources of electricity may lead to greater fluctuations in supply. We engaged rem...

Many studies have shown that crowd-support, such as cheering during sport events, can have a positive impact on athletes' performance. However, up until recently this support was only possible if the supporters and the athletes were geographically co-located. Can cheering be done remotely and would this be effective? In this paper we investigate th...

Organizations increasingly rely on digital tools, such as social media, to harvest public opinion on a variety of issues ranging from brand reputations to political debates. One area in which digital tools have great potential is in consultation on design of public spaces. Public organizations are expected to consult with users of a public space be...

Designing with the community brings about a number of benefits, including tacit and contextual knowledge about the problem domain; this is especially apparent in rural settings. However, designing for problems that have yet to embed themselves in the fabric of society (i.e. future problems) poses a number of challenges, as they typically present in...

This article reports on a modification of the user-kNN algorithm that measures the similarity between users based on the similarity of text reviews, instead of ratings. We investigate the performance of text semantic similarity measures and we evaluate our text-based user-kNN approach by comparing it to a range of ratings-based approaches in a rati...

Sharing Biometric data such as heart rate over social networks is gaining popularity as applications such as Runkeeper, Azumio and Nike+ provide free services that allow users to share this data online. Yet research on the effects that sharing this very personal data has, is negligible. To facilitate research in this area we developed BioShare; an...

We are exploring attitudes to renewable energy supply with the remote island community of Tiree. As part of this engagement, we are working with local children to introduce the topic of the energy generation potential of renewables (i.e. from wind and solar power). In this paper, we report on our early attempts to broker this engagement using a phy...

This paper presents Clasp, a novel tactile anxiety management, communication and peer support tool developed with, by and for adults diagnosed with High Functioning Autism (HFA). Clasp connects a tactile anxiety coping device to a smartphone, which records and communicates anxiety levels for self-feedback and reflection. By adopting an iterative pr...

There is growing research interest in exploring how biometric data is and can be shared across online social networks. However, most existing tools for sharing biometric data lock researchers into vendor-specific solutions that cannot be easily adapted to the specific researchers' requirements, users' needs and ethical considerations. To mitigate t...

This paper presents Clasp, a novel tactile anxiety management, communication and peer support tool developed with, by and for adults diagnosed with High Functioning Autism (HFA). Clasp connects a tactile anxiety coping device to a smartphone, which records and communicates anxiety levels for self-feedback and reflection. By adopting an iterative pr...

Software engineering for ‘social good’ is an area receiving growing interest in recent years. Software is increasingly seen as a way to promote positive social change: this includes initiatives such as Code for America and events such as hackathons, which strive to build innovative software solutions with a social conscience. From a software engine...

There is growing research interest in exploring how biometric data is and can be shared across online social networks . However, most existing tools for sharing biometric data lock researchers into vendor-specific solutions that cannot be easily adapted to the ...

With peak oil behind us, nuclear generation capacity dwindling, and increasingly daunting looking carbon emissions targets, we are moving to a world where we must consider transitioning to renewable energy sources. Renewables are time varying and their inherent unpredictability must challenge our everyday assumptions around energy availability-lead...

#Patchworks is a citizen-led co-design project to design innovative technologies for and with homeless people in the North West of England. The project involved 3 quite distinct communities: Signposts, a community resource centre that works with homeless people in Morecambe; Madlab, a community of DIY hackers and creative technologists in Mancheste...

A number of studies in the literature have looked into the use of real-time biometric data to improve one's own physiological performance and wellbeing. However, there is limited research that looks into the effects that sharing biometric data with others could have on one's social network. The video documents the design and development of HeartLin...

A number of studies in the literature have looked into the use of real-time biometric data to improve one's own physiological performance and wellbeing. However, there is limited research that looks into the effects that sharing biometric data with others could have on one's social network. The video documents the design and development of HeartLin...

Science-fiction prototyping is often used to explore the social implications of science and technology and to provide inspiration for innovation. The future that is being imagined however often exhibits a form of techno-optimism. This paper critiques that optimism by describing the #Patchworks project in which science fiction prototypes were used t...

#Patchworks is a citizen-led co-design project to design innovative technologies for and with homeless people in the North West of England. The project involved 3 quite distinct communities: Signposts, a community resource centre that works with homeless people in Morecambe; Madlab, a community of DIY hackers and creative technologists in Mancheste...

In this paper we introduce Speedplay, an interdisciplinary management approach for digital and social innovation research devised to negotiate the challenges of working in partnership with hard-to-reach communities in fast-paced project environments. By introducing two case studies, we illustrate how the approach has emerged and how it has been app...

In this paper, we present the ethical issues that emerged while designing, developing and testing HeartLink. HeartLink is a system designed for providing remote crowd-support during challenging and sustained physical activities such as long-distance running.

Automatically extracting actionable knowledge from on-line social media has attracted a growing interest from both academia and the industry. However, little clarity exists in relation to what actionable knowledge is, whether it can be measured and where it is more likely to be found. This paper makes an attempt at answering the above questions by...

Much has been documented in the literature on sentiment analysis and document summarisation. Much of this applies to long structured text in the form of documents and blog posts. With a shift in social media towards short commentary (see Facebook status updates and twitter tweets), the difference in comment structure may affect the accuracy of sent...

This paper reports on VoiceYourView, a kind of intelligent kiosk, which uses speech recognition and natural language processing to gather the public's creative input on the public space designs. Over a six week period, VoiceYourView was deployed in a public space and 2000 design critiques were collected from 600 people. The paper shows that people...

Self-adaptive systems (SASs) have the ability to reconfigure their behavior to respond to changing external conditions. A key element of a SAS, therefore, is how to monitor the environment so that appropriate adaptations can be triggered. In complex systems, monitoring the environment in its entirety is either impossible or too expensive. As a resu...

this paper we examine a classical AI problem (knowledge maintenance) and propose an innovative solution (collaborative maintenance) that has been inspired by the recommendation technique of collaborative filtering and the concept of web communities. In particular, we will look at Ulysses, a database driven, entertainment Web site that uses user pro...

In this paper we propose the combined use of different methods to improve the data analysis process. This is obtained by combining inductive and deductive techniques. We also use different inductive techniques such as clustering algorithms, to derive ...

Case-base maintenance is an important emerging issue for case-base reasoners as they scale-up to handle real-world problems in unstable environments. Overtime the contents of a case-base may become out-of-date or inconsistent with the current target problem space, and maintenance strategies must be devised to help recognise and repair these problem...

Maintaining large-scale content repositories is a challenging issue. In this paper we describe collaborative maintenance, a novel framework to intelligently support a distributed user-driven maintenance strategy here implemented in the Ulysses online entertainment planner.

These days, in business, there is a general agreement and understanding that it is important to maximize and manage the use and reuse of the intellectual assets of an organisation. This has led to increased interest in knowledge management and recently researchers have explored the role of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques within more traditi...

. CBR (case-based reasoning) has considerable potential for developing intelligent assistants for the World Wide Web. We examine intelligent applications already existent online and find that they can be divided into agent applications and thin client applications. Several case-based intelligent systems already exist on the web. These applications...