Paolo Buono

Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro | Università di Bari · Department of Computer Science

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...

Hypergraphs are a generalization of graphs in which edges (hyperedges) can connect more than two vertices—as opposed to ordinary graphs where edges involve only two vertices. Hypergraphs are a fairly common data structure but there is little consensus on how to visualize them. To optimize a hypergraph drawing for readability, we need a layout algor...

Data visualization made of multiple visualization techniques, e.g., dashboards and small multiples, is taking the scene as data, AI algorithms and their analysis are becoming more complex and articulated. However, still too little is said about what are the core dimensions of these interactions that may contribute to characterize visualization tech...

Nell’Internet of Things, il mondo reale e quello virtuale sono connessi attraverso sensori che ricevono ed elaborano dati dall’ambiente circostante. Tali oggetti “intelligenti” permettono modalità di fruizione interattive e multimediali utili nei beni culturali per arricchire le esperienze dei visitatori. Si propone un sistema in cui un curatore mu...

The use of technology to make a city smart provides opportunities and threats. Cities can be analyzed from different perspectives and dimensions. This paper addresses the level of security of Smart Cities derived by the observation of their technological level, according to a model that also considers several application domains. As a case study, t...

Monitoring user workload during task performance is a relevant and widely investigated topic in the aviation field of study due to its associations with the level of safety and number of human errors. The current study aims at assessing the workload of pilots wearing sensors while performing typical fly operations. To this purpose, a mobile app abl...

Visual objects made of multiple views, e.g., dashboards and small multiples, are taking the scene in information communication and visual patterns design, but still vague are the studies that try to abstract away from characterizing them at the level of their single charts, and rather focus on their structural characteristics and the resulting inte...

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...

This paper summarizes some works performed in Information Visualization and Visual Analytics in the last two decades at the IVU Lab (Interaction, Visualization and Usability and UX Laboratory) of the University of Bari Aldo Moro. This Lab has a long tradition in HCI. At the IVU Lab, Paolo Buono is the coordinator of the Information Visualization an...

Decisions that people make every day are affected by the information available in a given moment. Predictive models are used to estimate future values. For a given set of data and an analysis goal, the results of the models can vary, so it is important to select the most accurate model for the set of data. This paper proposes a Visual Analytics tec...

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...

Automation in computing systems has always been considered a valuable solution to unburden the user. Internet of Things (IoT) technology best suits automation in different domains, such as home automation, retail, industry, and transportation, to name but a few. While these domains are strongly characterized by implicit user interaction, more recen...

We propose a new approach—called PK-clustering—to help social scientists create meaningful clusters in social networks. Many clustering algorithms exist but most social scientists find them difficult to understand, and tools do not provide any guidance to choose algorithms, or to evaluate results taking into account the prior knowledge of the scien...

This paper reports the assessment of the infographics-value (IGV) short scale, designed to measure the value in the use of infographics. The scale was made to assess the implicit quality dimensions of infographics. These dimensions were experienced during the execution of tasks in a contextualized scenario. Users were asked to retrieve a piece of i...

We propose a new paradigm---called PK-clustering---to help social scientists create meaningful clusters in social networks. Many clustering algorithms exist but most social scientists find them difficult to understand, and tools do not provide any guidance to choose algorithms, or to evaluate results taking into account the prior knowledge of the s...

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...

The analysis of air quality data may reveal the quality of life and can prevent dangers for the citizen health. Assuming that some chemical compounds in the air produce a bad smell, people may detect that something is going wrong acting as sensors that alerts potential risks. This work presents a visual analytics approach to support air quality exp...

New Information and Communication Technologies have a large potential to improve general public awareness of the importance of Cultural Heritage (CH) and to provide tools that can make visits to historical sites more interesting and enjoyable. The Internet of Things (IoT) technology can further contribute to these goals, by allowing visitors to mus...

Predictive analysis is an important part of data analysis. Predictive models, based on Statistics or Machine Learning, are increasingly used to estimate, with a certain probability, future values of the variables that describe a phenomenon. Different models produce different results on a same dataset; thus, several models should be compared in orde...

The correct use of energy can heavily impact on a family monthly bills and can also contribute to reduce the global air pollution production. Despite many available systems for domestic energy consumption, the real understanding of how domestic devices affect the total energy consumption is still a challenge. The Internet of Things (IoT) technology...

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...

Parallel Aggregated Ordered Hypergraph (PAOH) is a novel technique to visualize dynamic hypergraphs. Hypergraphs are a generalization of graphs where edges can connect several vertices. Hypergraphs can be used to model networks of business partners or co-authorship networks with multiple authors per article. A dynamic hypergraph evolves over discre...

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....

Recent technologies are offering today many possibilities to end users, which ask for continuous support in a variety of situations. Internet of things (IoTs) and the proliferation of smart devices are offering many opportunities that raise the need to standardise protocols for their interoperability and interaction languages for their management....

Modern technologies support people’s life in multiple contexts like the assistive one. The pervasiveness of the so-called “Smart Objects”, related to the Internet of Things technologies, is boosting this in many ways. The support for old people to take the daily tablets through an automatic device is an example. This work presents the prototype of...

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.

The deep learning approach has increased the quality of automatic medical diagnoses at the cost of building qualified datasets to train and test such supervised machine learning methods. Image annotation is one of the main activity of dermatologists and the quality of annotation depends on the physician experience and on the number of studied cases...

Polar coordinates have been widely used in various techniques of interactive data visualization. The spatial organization through circular and radial layouts is implemented in a wide range of statistical charts and plots and is applicable for space-filling techniques and for node-link-group diagrams. Different arrangements of dots, lines and areas...

People, and mainly elderly people, need a continuous support for different reasons. Recent technologies are offering many possibilities that was not possible to conceive in the past. In particular, the proliferation of IoT devices raise the need to standardize protocols and interaction languages. The aim of this work is to create a device for the m...

The growing availability of smart objects is stimulating researchers to investigate the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon from different perspectives. The potential of this technology is evident in different domains. In Cultural Heritage (CH), it may enhance access to CH collections, in order to ensure a more engaging visit experience and to incr...

This demo presents a platform for the definition of IoT-enhanced visits to Cultural Heritage (CH) sites. The platform is characterized by an End-User Development paradigm applied to the Internet of Things technologies and customized for the CH domain. It allows different stakeholders to configure the behavior of smart objects in order to create mor...

People awareness in various contexts has been widely considered in the literature. A form of awareness is the quantification of self, which requires a number of conditions to be implemented. The most important are: producing, computing and making sense of data. Sensors produce data at very high rates. A lot of research, in the field of data bases,...

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...

Download the paper for free from http://ivu.di.uniba.it/people/desolda.htm#Pubblicazioni (find the paper in the Journal section and click on the blue icon on the right side of the paper) ABSTRACT: Large interactive displays are increasingly placed in public (or semipublic) locations, including museums, shops, various city settings, and offices. Th...

Integration of human-centered design in a company's software development practice requires a thorough analysis of its current practices by both researchers and practitioners.

When working in distributed teams, it is very important to be aware of the activities of all members, since it provides hints about when they might be available for collaboration. We propose a novel visualization technique that combines several representations to show the daily patterns of team members׳ activities. It uses a 24 h circular display t...

The evolution of communication technologies provides support to the collaboration of people that work in distributed teams. Group awareness is an important requirement for activity coordination, since understanding the activities of the others provides the context for the individual own activities and gives indications on how individual contributio...

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...

Atmospheric emission inventories are useful tools to support informed decision making in air quality management. In the framework of Apulia Region emission inventory, a tool for the industrial atmospheric emission management called Territorial Emissions Cadastre (CET) was developed. CET is a Web-based system able to store all data related to the in...

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...

The huge amount of videos, available for various purposes, makes video editing software very important and popular among people. One of the uses of video in medicine is to store surgical operations for educational or legal purposes. In particular, in telemedicine, the exchange of audio and video plays a very important role. In most cases, surgeons...

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...

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...

Emission inventories are useful tools in air quality management policies. In the framework of Apulia Region (South of Italy) inventory, the Territorial Emission Cadastre (CET) was developed. CET stores the huge amount of data concerning industrial plants. In order to easily interact with input data and analyze them, a graphical user interface that...

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...

In spite of advances in technologies for working with data, analysts still spend an inordinate amount of time diagnosing data quality issues and manipulating data into a usable form. This process of 'data wrangling' often constitutes the most tedious and time-consuming aspect of analysis. Though data cleaning and integration are longstanding issues...

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...

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...

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...

Today surveillance systems are everywhere. Human observers watching live videos of specific areas are not efficient due to the likely loss of attention. On the other side, unattended surveillance systems require that people analyze hours of recordings when they have to search for some specific events, e.g. identify people responsible of violence, t...

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...

The increasing adoption of video surveillance makes it possible to watch over sensitive areas and identify people responsible for damage, theft and violence. However, when such events are not detected immediately, the subsequent video analysis can be a long and tedious task. The aim of this paper is to present a technique that allows a human invest...

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...

This paper describes the experience in designing and developing the CET system according to user-centred and participatory approaches. CET is a web-based system used by industries and experts of the regional government that monitor air quality. With CET, industries can officially declare their pollutant emissions in the atmosphere, while air qualit...

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...