Monica Landoni

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at Università della Svizzera italiana

Extended abstract from the 17th International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR 2024)

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.

This paper presents a framework for integrating scaffolding in co-design sessions with people with cognitive and learning disabilities. While scaffolding has been recognized for enhancing participant engagement in co-design, its application lacks standardization. Our study pursues three primary objectives: (1) Present two case studies involving an...

This paper investigates integrating creative activities with interactive technologies to enhance the participation and engagement of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Conducted in two workshops, the study explores the use of Play-Doh, drawing, and game creation, combined with Makey Makey and Scratch programming. Seven participants with va...

In this pictorial, we describe a user study carried out with a group of 20 first graders (ages 6-7). The aim of the study was to investigate if it is possible to infer children's engagement with technology by looking at their drawings. The analyses of children's drawings was informed by the Grammar of Visual Design (GVD) and the results evidence th...

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...

In this work, we reason how focusing on Information Retrieval (IR) for children and involving them in participatory studies would benefit the IR community. The Child Computer Interaction (CCI) community has embraced the child as a protagonist as their main philosophy, regarding children as informants, co-designers, and evaluators, not just users. L...

This paper explores the potential of AI-generated artwork to facilitate creative expression for individuals with intellectual disabilities. We present an inclusive approach called "Artistic Fusion", which combines original museum artwork with drawings contributed by participants with intellectual disabilities, leveraging the Midjour-ney platform. B...

Since universities have a crucial role in training the next generation of experts in the field, this exploratory study aims to investigate how universities present computing majors to prospective students to better understand potential barriers to diversity and inclusion. The study analyzes textual descriptions of computing majors, and titles and l...

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a Multisensory Diorama (MSD) intended as a tool to provide an alternative learning environment for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in museums. The MSD is designed to be interactive, engaging, and accessible to accommodate the specificities of participants with ID, and to help contextualiz...

Current user interfaces present many different features that assist users in reading and comprehending texts in digital format. Although internal factors, such as visual impairment and dyslexia, can impose serious reading difficulties for technology users, we focus on the interface solutions designed to alleviate external factors, such as text comp...

This paper contributes to the discussion initiated in a recent SIGIR paper describing a gap in the information retrieval (IR) literature on query understanding–where they come from and whether they serve their purpose. Particularly the connection between query variability and search engines regarding consistent and equitable access to all users. We...

Why AI does not include gender in its agenda? The role of gender in AI, both as part of the community of agents creating such technologies, as well as part of the contents processed by such technologies is, by far, conflictive. Women have been, again, obliterated by this fundamental revolution of our century. Highly innovative and the first step in...

Motivation & challenge: Computer Science suffers from a lack of diversity that gets perpetuated by the most dominant and visible role models. The community is doing itself a disservice by upholding techno-solutionism, short-term efficiency, and busyness as central values. Those models are created and consolidated over time through social and cultur...

We summarize the outcomes of the most recent KidRec Workshop (June 2022), which was held for the first time in a hybrid, synchronous mode. The focus of the workshop was to understand the impact of the COVID-19 era on the design, development, and evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems for which children are the primary stakeholders. Date: June...

In this manuscript, we discuss the findings from an introductory survey conducted with more than 50 teachers in Italy. We inquired about teachers’ opinions of educational technology used in the classroom, in particular search tools. Qualitative and quantitative data inferred from collected responses provide us with a multifaceted picture of the dif...

In this manuscript, we argue for the need to further look at search as learning (SAL) with children as the primary stakeholders. Inspired by how children learn and considering the classroom (regardless of the teaching modality) as a natural educational ecosystem, we posit that scaffolding is the tie that can simultaneously allow for learning to sea...

Exposure to technology impacts children’s perception and conceptualisation of the way devices they regularly use work. This prompts us to study if almost two years of online teaching, enabled by a broad range of technologies, have influenced the way children imagine a search companion would look and behave when helping them perform school-related s...

We summarize outcomes from the 2021 KidRec Workshop, co-located with the ACM Interaction Design and Children conference. The theme of the 5 th edition of KidRec was Search and Recommendation Technology through the Lens of a Teacher. During the workshop, we discussed why teachers are one of the main stakeholders when designing information retrieval...

We present a brief overview of the discussions and takeaways emerging from the IR for Children 2000--2020: Where Are We Now? Workshop, co-located with the 44 th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Date : 15 July, 2021. Website : http://www.fab4.science/IR4C/.

The purpose of our research is to use design as a mean to support children becoming more aware of stereotypes in their own artefacts. We have been facing this challenge leveraging on Digital StoryTelling (DST) as a powerful instrument to detect children's beliefs and values including those connecting to gender. In addition, considering the role of...

Recent developments in the mobile app industry have resulted in various types of mobile apps, each targeting a different need and a specific audience. Consequently, users access distinct apps to complete their information need tasks. This leads to the use of various apps not only separately, but also collaboratively in the same session to achieve a...

In the classroom, search tools enable students to access online resources. While these tools have many benefits in theory, in practice there are also ethical issues to consider. In this article, we discuss a number of ethics-related problems teachers are faced with and they need to find solutions for. Based on our own research experience developing...

In the classroom environment, search tools are the means for students to access Web resources. The perspectives of students, researchers, and industry practitioners lead the ongoing research debate in this area. In this article, we argue in favor of incorporating a new voice into this debate: teachers. We showcase the value of involving teachers in...

Introduction. This paper discusses causes behind failed searches from the searchers’ perspective and examines associated emotions. Method. We conducted an online study with real users in their natural settings. Participants were asked to use a digital library and run one specific and one exploratory search task, using their own topics. They also an...

Research suggests that dialogic reading and wordless picture books may improve narrative production and comprehension leading to better school readiness. We aim to understand children’s experiences using a wordless picture book scaffolded by audio prompts. We designed, implemented and assessed the Spring-a-story web app with 35 children aged 3 to 6...

Digital libraries (DLs) have been evaluated implicitly by analyzing the query behavior extracted from the log files (LFs), and explicitly by conducting user studies and usability tests. Unfortunately, such approaches do not fully assess the quality of the user experience (UX). Recently, UX is gaining momentum as a critical success factor across all...

This short review discusses the outcomes of the 3 rd Workshop of the International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec 2019) , co-located with the 2019 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, which took place June 12-15 in Boise, Idaho, USA. The goal for the workshop w...

Children struggle with translating their information needs into effective queries to initiate the search process. In this paper, we explore the degree to which the use of a Vocal Assistant (VA) as an intermediary between a child and a search engine can ease query formulation and foster completion of successful searches. We also examine the potentia...

Today's children spend considerable time online, searching and receiving information from various websites and apps. While searching for information, e.g. for school or hobbies, children use search systems to locate resources and receive site recommendations that might be useful for them. The call for good, reliable, child-friendly systems has been...

Interaction Design and Children (IDC) as an academic field, and as a community, has a responsibility to engage with the many and diverse ethical challenges that arise from work that concerns the creation of digital technology for and with children -- both in terms of research and industry contexts. This panel builds on a short history of similar ev...

Gender is a major variable affecting identity and life opportunities from a young age. Our research aims to explore the persistence of gender stereotypes in multimedia stories created by children with the final purpose of attenuating this stereotypical thinking by proposing new processes and tools. The paper investigates the following research ques...

Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) research studies how users interact with IR systems and evaluates the users’ satisfaction with the retrieval process. Thus, it focuses on how users behave when they interact with IR systems. The involvement of potential users, and access to dynamic and individual information needs are essential elements in II...

Designing technology for and with children comes with unique ethical challenges and responsibilities, related both to the inclusion of children in the research and design processes and to the outcomes of that work. With this panel, our intention is to create a forum for critical reflection and debate about best practices, underlying drivers and per...

Cambridge Core - General - User Studies for Digital Library Development - edited by Milena Dobreva

User Studies for Digital Library Development - edited by Milena Dobreva June 2012

In the paper we describe an exploration into the design of an authoring tool to support the creation of multimedia stories. We explicitly targeted children with no reading or writing skills and their educators. Children in this age group often enjoy reading and creating stories together with adults and in so doing develop important pre-literacy ski...

We explore the roles children play in the design and evaluation of technological tools in a formal educational environment. In order to do so, we describe two separate projects set in a formal educational context: primary schools, with children aged 8–10, in Switzerland (called PADS), and with older students, 11–12, in Scotland (called CHIS). In th...

We propose to design playful solutions to help young people better understand the consequences of their use of language in a community of peers. Our system, CARE, will analyse the content of their messages and extract the emotions they are charged with, both in terms of strength (arousal) and valence (negative or positive). Their effects will be tr...

This paper describes the findings of a study into how children engage with and enjoy reading digital stories. We considered stories created by children with an application called Fiabot! that we designed to support the creation of multimedia fairy tales in school. We asked a group of 25 volunteers, aged 9 to 12, to act as assessors and read the mul...

This workshop explores the many roles children can play in the design of technology for their own use. Much literature has reported on how children have been mainly playing co-designer roles. By looking closer it emerges that children have mostly been involved in the ideation phase of design. More rarely were they actively engaged in other design p...

(Foreword) This is an exciting time for computer science (informatics), computer scientists, and computer science students. In just over a half century, the field has risen from infancy to assume a significant role in almost all disciplines, not only science and engineering but also social sciences, medicine, and law. It is the engine of growth in...

The wide use of digital technology for educational purposes opens up some issues regarding its integration within the school curriculum. Our research aims to contribute to the current discussion about how mobile/portable technology can be integrated into formal education. In this perspective, we consider digital technology and media as a potential...

With this half-day workshop we will offer a venue to colleagues in Arts and Humanities, designers and computer scientists at large for sharing their experiences about raising creativity levels when running collaborative design sessions. We will target researchers interested in collaborative design involving different types of users including adults...

In this paper we describe our experience in designing an application to support children in producing their stories in a formal setting, a primary school. In particular, we reflect on the implications of our findings on levels of creativity found in the produced stories. Besides, we compare two versions of our application: one is text-based and the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that uncertainty may be caused not only by a knowledge gap in the mind of a user with respect to a given subject or topic, but also by the various complexities associated with the information seeking and retrieval (IS&R) process in a digital environment. Design/methodology/approach – Both quantitative...

This paper describes a diary study aimed at evaluating the User Experience (UX) of 7 to 12 years old children when interacting with eBooks. The goal was to understand whether, in a context of leisure reading, enhanced eBooks provide a better reading experience than basic eBooks. We took inspiration from Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory to define a be...

This paper presents the results of a cooperative inquiry study aimed at developing a prototype of enhanced eBook for leisure reading. Together with a group of 9 to 11 years old children we explored various design ideas and, starting from these ideas, we developed the eBook prototype and elaborated a shortlist of recommendations. The paper aims to e...

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about how digital technology can be integrated into the formal education system. Within a longitudinal research study, which lasted four years, we conducted an investigation on how mobile technology can support educational activities as defined by a school curriculum. Among the topics included in the sch...

The wide use of digital technology for educational purposes opens some issues regarding its integration within the school curriculum. In this paper we present a model that illustrates the roles of teachers in transforming digital technology as a resource to develop skills as required in educational curricula. The Teacher Role in Introducing Technol...

This paper draws on a Cooperative Inquiry study conducted at a children's library that aimed to design and develop more engaging eBooks for children, with children as design partners. The study was characterized by four different stages where we experimented both low-tech and high-tech prototyping by introducing tablet computers as tools for suppor...

This paper focuses on the educational benefits of Digital Storytelling (DST) in the context of a primary school and on the importance of a DST application that supports teaching strategies and pedagogical objectives (as defined by the school curriculum). The work presented here is part of a 4-year longitudinal study aimed at understanding how to de...

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organi- zations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX’12 evaluation campaign, which consisted of a five tracks: Linked Data, Relevance Feedback, Snippet Retrieval,...

BooksOnline'12, the fifth workshop in the series, aims to offer a forum for bringing together expertise from academia, industry and libraries to facilitate the exchange of research results and technology in the field of digital libraries with specific focus on online books and complementary social media. The focus of this year's workshop is "engagi...

Game design environments are traditionally used as means for engaging non-programmers in the learning process. However, these environments lack specific support for teaching computational thinking to novices. Typically, such skills are acquired in ad hoc practical sessions with supervision provided by teachers or peers. The usual scenario is where...

In this work in progress paper we explore the many facets and activities that contribute to the definition of reading experience, in particular when considering children as readers of electronic books (eBooks). We aim at understanding the importance of reading context and book choice as part of the reading experience in order to set up the main ste...

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2011 evaluation campaign, which consisted of a five active tracks: Books and Social Search, Data Centric, Quest...

Educational game design environments enable end users to create computer games and are used as an engaging medium to teach programming to novice programmers. Although the cooperative dimension of end-user programming has been recognized and collaboration among novice programmers is advised, educational game design environments have remained solitar...

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2011 evaluation campaign, which consisted of a five active tracks: Books and Social Search, Data Centric, Quest...

The goal of the INEX 2011 Books and Social Search Track is to evaluate approaches for supporting users in reading, searching, and navigating book metadata and full texts of digitized books. The investi-gation is focused around four tasks: 1) the Social Search for Best Books task aims at comparing traditional and user-generated book metadata for ret...

The goal of the INEX 2013 Social Book Search Track is to evaluate approaches for supporting users in reading, searching, and navigating collections of books based on book metadata, the full texts of digitised books or associated user-generated content. The investigation is focused around three tasks: 1) the Social Book Search (SBS) task investigate...

Electronic books are gaining in popularity, but their potential is not fully exploited yet. This is especially true for children eBooks. HEBE (Highly Engaging eBook Experiences) project, aims to actively involve children in the design of a new concept of electronic book that enables the reader to "get lost" in it, namely to enable a new, highly eng...

In this paper, we report on our experience developing an evaluation tool called the Fun Semantic Differential Scales (FSDS). The FSDS has been developed for use with and by very young children (3 to 5 years old) to express their feelings when interacting with computer products. We applied an iterative approach in designing and evaluating early vers...

Prior-art search is a critical step in the examination procedure of a patent application. This study explores automatic query generation from patent documents to facilitate the time-consuming and labor-intensive search for relevant patents. It is essential for this task to identify discriminative terms in different fields of a query patent, which e...

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2010 evaluation campaign, which consisted of a wide range of tracks: Ad Hoc, Book, Data Centric, Interactive, Q...

This research focuses specifically on uncertainty and information seeking in a digital environment. In this research we argue that different types of uncertainty are associated with the information seeking process and that, with the proliferation of new and different search tools, sources and channels, uncertainty, positive/desirable or negative/un...

Semantic web technologies have been applied to many aspects of learning content authoring including semantic annotation, semantic search, dynamic assembly, and personalization of learning content. At the same time, social networking services have started to play an important role in the authoring process by supporting authors' collaborative activit...

We describe our planned research in using affective feedback from body movement and posture to recognize affective states of users. Bodily expression of affect has received far less attention in research than facial expression. The aim of our research is to further investigate how affective states are communicated through bodily expression and to d...

The goal of the INEX 2010 Book Track is to evaluate approaches for supporting users in reading, searching, and navigating the full texts of digitized books. The investigation is focused around four tasks: 1) the Book Retrieval (Best Books to Reference) task aims at comparing traditional and book-specific retrieval approaches, 2) the Focused Book Se...

The goal of the INEX Book Track is to evaluate approaches for supporting users in searching, navigating and reading the full texts of digitized books. The investigation is focused around four tasks: 1) Best Books to Reference, 2) Prove It, 3) Structure Extraction, and 4) Active Reading. In this paper, we report on the setup and the results of these...