Ombretta Gaggi

• PhD in Computer Science
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Padua

Online Social Networks (OSNs) rely on content moderation systems to ensure platform and user safety by preventing malicious activities, like the spread of harmful content. However, there is a growing consensus suggesting that such systems are unfair to historically marginalized individuals, fragile users, and minorities. Additionally, OSN policies...

Action video-games (AVGs) could improve reading efficiency, enhancing not only visual attention but also phonological processing. Here we tested the AVG effects upon three consolidated language-based predictors of reading development in a sample of 79 pre-readers at-risk and 41 non-at-risk for developmental dyslexia. At-risk children were impaired...

This paper presents a new tool to help people with visual impairments learn mathematical functions through the extensive use of sounds and touch. STEM subjects like mathematics are difficult for this kind of user, since concepts like lines or curves heavily depend on visual content to convey essential information. GraficiAccessibili is a mobile a...

Background The wide use of the term Cognitive Reserve (CR) is in need of a clear and shared definition of its concept and of the development of new tools, quick and easy to use and updated for the people of today. This study describes the online short CRIq (s-CRIq), the new shorter version of the CRIq, following an item analysis revision, and compa...

This topical collection focuses on applying sensors and communications technologies for social good [...]

The digital and mobile revolutions have changed the way people live their sexuality. Sexting, the practice of sending or receiving any sexually explicit content through mobile devices, has gained popularity, especially amongst teenagers and young adults, bringing several concerns, such as the uncontrolled spread of personal nude or semi-nude media...

L’esame neuropsicologico dell'adulto con lesioni cerebrali o patologie che influenzano il sistema nervoso centrale si è rivelato indispensabile a fini diagnostici, prognostici, peritali e riabilitativi. Pertanto la valutazione neuropsicologica è diventata una parte fondamentale della pratica clinica di molte strutture sanitarie e richiede l'utilizz...

Personalized learning models can cut student dropout rates, boost student success, improve the integration of online and on-site students, better support teachers in mixed-teaching modalities, enhance accessibility, and more.

Digital games represent one of the most compelling fields in computer science, embodying a wide variety of technical challenges. Thanks to the evolution of streaming and broadband technology, new service provisioning schemes have emerged. Remote play streaming services represent an interesting case study deserving a thorough investigation. To this...

Background Research over how suicide survivors approach services is limited. Aims: This cross-sectional study explores the psychological state and perceived social support of Italian survivors, including those who have not sought for help, and investigates differences for gender or kinship with the departed. Methods: Rule-based system (RBS) analyse...

Wearable technology is no longer science fiction. Thanks to the growing capability in the production chain to miniaturize complex electronics, a wide variety of gadgets that can be worn or included in dresses and accessories have emerged. These smart gadgets can collect data about the physical condition of the user and/or the environment providing...

Population aging is considered to be one of the most significant social transformations of the twenty-first century. In this paper, we evaluate the acceptability and usability of a system designed to silently monitor the activity and condition of older adults, with a particular focus on the elderly affected by cognitive decline. The system is compo...

Immersive technology is expected to become a key player in the next wave of consumer electronics with potential applications spanning a wide variety of sectors. Yet, there are a number of technological hurdles which need to be addressed. Without speed and computation capability, interactivity cannot be ensured. More than often the constrained natur...

The ubiquity of mobile technology has opened the door to the new era of mobile sensing. Through this new paradigm, physical phenomena can be observed in a distributed way, crowd-sourcing the data measurement tasks to smartphones and/or other popular smart wearables. Mobile sensing and wireless communications can hence be employed to gather data and...

Is the World Wide Web for everyone? Long story short: no and unfortunately it is not only a matter of infrastructures, level of instruction or economic conditions. People affected by visual impairments have often difficulties in navigating web pages for a wide range of reasons. One of the biggest obstacles nowadays is the use of CAPTCHAs, powerful...

The technological evolution in the mobile sector has experienced an exponential growth in the last years. The number of functionalities has grown, and of course the way we use these devices has changed. Starting with calls and messages, introducing cameras, implementing Internet connectivity, and finally introducing the sensor technology, we arrive...

In this paper, we present a complete platform for an innovative way to teach mathematics. The platform is composed of a serious game to help children to understand fractions, and a web portal that allows teachers to configure exercises involving fractions, but also to design completely new exercises using a very simple block-based programming langu...

The advent of broadband technology has revolutionized the fruition of multimedia contents. Moreover, the cloud is now moving the computational load from domestic devices to remote servers, enabling the provisioning of new multimedia services through the Internet. To provide a proper user experience, a low E2E latency and a high bandwidth are both r...

In neuropsychology, the assessment of speech production has to be very accurate and precise when a patient shows disorganized discourse in conversation. Clinician's work in such cases, consists in a multi-tasking operation based on the observation and the quantification of a number of parameters of speech, occurring during the patient's discourse p...

Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI) is a disability that entails a visual deficit, due to a brain damage. Children affected by this disability are not able to see an object if it is not moving. In this paper, we present a study on the use of serious games in the assessment and rehabilitation of children with CVI. Our serious games help them keeping fo...

Mathematics is often a hard subject for children, especially because they are usually not able to perceive any concrete connection between math and the real world. There is a rift between what they do for fun ad what they are required to do at school. This is partially due to the concrete aspects of the activities they do in those two contexts, whi...

Wearable devices are constantly expanding in number and functionalities within both the IT market and the fashion market. Smart watches have become very popular and have moved from a tool only showing information related to the smartphone to a device able to monitor and display a vast plethora of data, including data related to the owner's health (...

In recent years we have seen a great proliferation of smart vehicles, ranging from cars to little drones (both terrestrial and aerial), all endowed with sensors and communication capabilities. It is hence easy to foresee a future with even more smart and connected vehicles moving around, occupying space and creating an Internet of Vehicles (IoV). I...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third EAI International Conference on Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good, GOODTECHS 2017, held in Pisa, Italy, November 29-30, 2017. The 38 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The papers reflect the design, implementation, deploym...

ClimbTheWorld is a serious game to promote physical activity, by asking users to climb stairs, simulating the climbing of a real building. In this paper, we describe the complete redesign of the game to improve its persuasion capability, by adding collaboration and competition between users, and micro-goals to encourage the user to do not give up....

The development of visual skills is crucial in sustaining an adaptive cognitive and social development in children. The paper describes the result of a pilot study, involving a group of 4 years old children, with a set of serious games to improve the assessment and rehabilitation process in children with CVI. The system uses an eye tracker system t...

Many enchanting cultural heritage locations are hidden from tourists, especially when considering countries full of historic attractions. Tourists tend to consider only mainstream monuments and towns, neglecting wonderful little jewels along their travel itinerary. However, this is generally not their fault, as travelers cannot be aware of all the...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Second EAI international Conference on Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good, GOODTECHS 2016, held in Venice, Italy, November 30 – December 1, 2016. The 38 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers reflect the design, implementation, deployment, ope...

The popularity of digital games and the wide diffusion of mobile devices with sensors and communication capabilities have led many researchers to think how this technology can be put to good use to improve people’s lives and, in general, our society. In this short survey we present an overview on how mobile games can go beyond their entertainment p...

The high diffusion of smartphones in the users' pockets allows to sense their movements, thus monitoring the amount of physical activity they do during the day. But, it also gives the possibility to use these devices to persuade people to change their behaviours. In this paper, we present ClimbTheWorld, a serious game which uses a machine learning...

The increasing fragmentation of mobile devices market has created the problem of supporting all the possible mobile platforms to reach the highest number of potential users. One possible solution is to use cross-platform frameworks, that let develop only one application that is then deployed to all the supported target platforms. Currently availabl...

ClimbTheWorld is a serious game to promote physical activity, by asking users to climb stairs, simulating the climbing of a real building. In this paper, we describe the complete redesign of the game to improve its persuasion capability, by adding collaboration and competition between users, and micro-goals to encourage the user to do not give up....

In this paper we analyze frameworks for mobile cross-platform development according to their influence on energy consumed by the developed applications. We consider the use of different smartphones sensors, e.g., GPS, accelerometer, etc., and features, e.g., acquiring video or audio from the environment. In particular, we have studied how the amoun...

The popularity of digital games and the wide diffusion of mobile devices with sensors and communication capabilities have led many researchers to think how this technology can be put to good use to improve people’s lives and, in general, our society. In this short survey we present an overview on how mobile games can go beyond their entertainment p...

The widespread adoption of mobile technology has opened the door to a new era for the public health sector. The ability to collect, share and access community health related data are key factors that have made mobile health an appealing addon to medicine practitioners and researchers. Mobile sensing and wireless communications can be exploited to c...

Stress condition, if experienced for an extended amount of time, can negatively affect individual's health. Several external sensors monitoring different physiological states correlated with stress, or smartphone apps that monitor individuals context, have been leveraged to assess stress state in everyday life. The less intrusive ''human-smartphone...

A doctor cannot perform a good diagnosis without the user collaboration. One of the major problem for ophthalmologists with children is to capture and maintain their attention while performing their tests. Sometimes children give wrong answers, or not accurate, since they are no longer interested in the task. In this paper we use the serious game p...

The increasing number of people that are overweight due to a sedentary life requires persuasive strategies to convince people to change their behaviours. In this paper, we present a machine learning based technique to recognize and count stairsteps when a person climbs or descends stairs. This technique has been used as part of ClimbTheWorld, a rea...

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting reading acquisition. DD cannot be diagnosed before starting the primary school; thereby, one of the main challenges is to obtain an early DD identification even during preschool years. Achieving this goal could help children at risk for DD to limit the impact of this disorder. T...

In the last few years, the number of overweight people in wealthy countries, either among adults and children, is dramatically increasing mostly due to an incorrect diet and the lack of physical activity [6] [3]: modern technologies allow people to avoid simple strains of everyday life, like climbing the stairs using elevators and escalators. But p...

In this paper we analyze energy consumption of mobile applications using different smartphones sensors, e.g., GPS, accelerometer, etc., and features, e.g., acquiring video or audio from the environment. In particular, we have studied how the use of frameworks for mobile cross-platform development may influence the amount of required energy for the...

The paper presents a comparison between different frameworks for cross-platform mobile development, MoSync, Titanium, jQuery Mobile and Phonegap, with particular attention to development of applications with animations. We define a set of criteria for the evaluation and we develop the same game as case study app, with the aim to provide an unbias j...

The number and types of applications developed for multi-touch tabletops are dramatically increased in the last years, mainly due to the fact that interactive tabletops allow a more natural interaction with the user through their multi-touch interfaces. Despite many applications share a big set of common features, e.g., gestures recognition, interf...

In this paper we present Xplane, a software layer for fast development of applications running in separate, independent windows in multi-touch interactive tabletops. Our framework supports gestures recognition and communication between different windows or applications. Moreover, it is based on web technologies to abstract from hardware and softwar...

In the last few decades our lifestyle has deeply changed thanks to the advances in science and engineering: public transportation, escalators, elevators etc., have deeply reduced the physical activity that people usually make during the day. This, combined with an incorrect diet, has increased the number of overweighted people and people with cardi...

CVI (Cerebral Visual Impairment) is the leading cause of visual impairment in the United States and the Western Europe. Due to the high number of different inabilities that children could have when affected by CVI, it is crucial for the rehabilitation process to start from a good assessment, especially at early ages. In this paper we present HelpMe...

This paper presents PhotoTrip, an interactive online service which is able to recommend not widely known, but interesting, places along travel itineraries, without human intervention. These points of interest are identified by analyzing the geo-tagged pictures contained in Flickr community. PhotoTrip enriches these pictures with information provide...

Dyslexia is one of the main cognitive disabilities affecting the reading acquisition. As it may interfere with educa-tional opportunities even in presence of adequate intelligence, it is of crucial importance to obtain early diagnosis and help affected children as soon as possible. Generally, dyslexia is diagnosed not earlier than primary school as...

Web 2.0 is evolving and offering services based on the wide popularity of smartphones and the possibility of gathering data ubiquitously from these mobile devices; this new paradigm is often referred to as Web2. In this paper, we hence present and discuss a Web2 application designed to enable users to interact with remote smartphones' cameras to re...

In this paper, we consider the problem of automatic verification of SMIL documents and present a tool which can assist the user in the complex task of authoring a multimedia presentation. The tool is based on a formal semantics defining the temporal aspects of SMIL elements by means of a set of inference rules. The rules, in the spirit of Hoare’s s...

One of the major problems of doctors when dealing with children is to capture and maintain their attention. This is particularly true for oculists that must test children eyes, especially if they are very young. In this paper we present PlayWithEyes, a serious game that aims at testing the children eyes while they are having fun playing with Lea sy...

In this paper we discuss the problem of efficient use of Content Management Systems in the development of a web site, and we propose a new approach towards the definition of a Green Content Management System (GCMS). Our GCMS distinguishes between pages which contain dynamic data and pages which are not supposed to change frequently. This second kin...

SMIL, Synchonized Multimedia Integration Lan-guage, is a W3C markup language for the definition of complex multimedia presentations. SMIL documents need a specific player for its playback and cannot be rendered by modern browsers. In this paper we present SmilingWeb, a first tentative to implement a cross-platform player for SMIL presentations cont...

The number of photos has significantly increased in the recent years together with the problem of how to manage them: a picture can be printed as is, arranged into a more interesting photo book or shared through the web. Digital photos have the advantage that can be easily stored and shared with family and friends from different cities or countries...

In this paper we define a formal semantics for the language SMIL which can be used in a number of applications. First of all, we propose a computer aided authoring system which include a Semantic Validator Module for the evaluation of the temporal consistency of the resulting multimedia presentation. If any temporal conflict is found, the system re...

In this paper we address the problem of comparing multimedia documents, which can be described according to different reference models. If we consider pre- sentations as collections of media items and constraints among them, expressed ac- cording to their reference model, they must be translated to a common formalism in order to compare their tempo...

In this article we describe a prototyping environment, which allows an author to set up and test a complex hypermedia presentation. It contains a visual editor, based on a graph notation, in which the nodes are media objects and the edges are the synchronization relations between them; an execution simulator, which helps the author to test the pres...

Multimedia documents are collections of media objects, synchronized by means of sets of temporal and spatial constraints. Any multimedia document definition is valid as long as the referred media objects are available and the constraints are satisfiable. Document validity depends on the context in which the document has to be presented. In this pap...

In this paper we present a model and an adaptation architecture for context-aware multimodal documents. A compound virtual document describes the different ways in which multimodal information can be structured and presented. Physical features are associated to media instances, while properties describe the context. Concrete documents are instantia...

In this paper we discuss issues concerning the consistent retrieval of parts of multimedia presentations from multimedia repositories. We introduce a class of multimedia presentations made of independent and synchronized media and discuss retrieval requirements of presentation fragments. Then we discuss a retrieval model capable of reconstructing t...

We present a framework for the design and management of multimodal document databases: virtual documents describe the different facets under which informa-tion can be delivered and presented, in terms of media, content, and presentation format. Concrete documents are composed and instantiated from virtual ones by aggregating and synchronizing media...

In this paper we present a state-transition model to describe multimedia presentation evolution. Each object is modelled as an independent entity with its own behavior and resources allocation: a certain amount of bandwidth, buffer and a display (or an audio channel) for its playback. The evolution of a single media is modelled by means of a finite...

In this paper we aim at defining a notion of equiva- lence for multimedia documents which can be described according to dierent models. If we consider a presen- tation as a collection of media items and constraints among them, the same temporal behavior can be defined in dierent ways. In particular, using SMIL language, dierent sequences of tags ca...

Data-centered approaches to multimedia presentation design and implementation can be developed by extending methodologies and technologies common in text-based applica- tions. A multimedia report is a multimedia presentation built on a set of data returned by one or more queries to multimedia repositories, integrated according to a template with ap...

This paper presents a synchronization model for hypermedia presentations. Several media, continuous, like video and audio files, and non-continuous, like text pages and images, are delivered separately in a distributed environment like the World Wide Web, and presented to the user in a coordinated way. The model is based on a set of synchronization...

Multimedia documents are an effective way to present different kinds of information, since the integration of different media types gives more expressive power and opportunities to catch the user attention. A multimedia report is a multimedia presentation built on a set of data returned by one or more queries to multimedia repositories, integrated...

In this paper we describe an authoring environment which allows the author to set up and test a complex multimedia presentation by defining the synchronization relationships among media. The main component of the authoring environment is a visual editor based on a graph notation, in which the nodes are media objects involved in a multimedia present...

In this paper we discuss some issues about information retrieval in multimedia presentations. We introduce a class of multimedia presentations made of independent and syn- chronized media, and discuss retrieval requirements of pre- sentation fragments. Then we discuss a retrieval model able to reconstruct the fragments of a presentation from the at...

Querying and searching the Web is an important research field which has drawn a number of concepts from databases and information retrieval fields, but has added its own models, requirements and techniques.

This paper discusses some issues related to authoring and navigating World Wide Web documents composed of continuous and non-continuous media, based on a video or audio narration to which static or dynamic documents are attached. The discussion stems from a model able to describe synchronization among media elements and media behavior depending on...