Rui Jose

• University of Minho

Smart city initiatives are being promoted across the world to address major urban challenges, and they all share a common belief in the transformative power of digital technologies. However, the pace of innovation in smart cities seems to be much slower than the rapid and profoundly disruptive transformations brought about by digital innovation in...

Smart Cities represent the next big frontier for computational science. However, the real-world impacts of this transformation have been considerably slower than other domains of digital innovation. In this work, we study the interplay between the core properties of digital platforms and the urban innovation contexts that aim to promote digital tra...

The high competitiveness of the corporate sector requires a strategic communication approach to bring brands closer to consumers. In this context, brand communities (BCs) can be an interesting asset for brands. This article uses the example of motorcycle brands to analyze how BCs on social media can enhance the strategic dimension of brand communic...

It is widely acknowledged that projects that seek to address complex socio-technical problems benefit from a deliberate mix of individuals, whose complementary expertise and skills can be leveraged in service of the project goals. Three ways through which this team diversity can be achieved are through industry-academia collaborations, through comb...

Public screen displays are now common in urban life and are increasingly perceived as a pervasive communication medium. Still, despite their huge potential to address a very generic and very relevant need, i.e. communication, public displays have not yet been appropriated by society as a general-purpose communication medium. Unlike mobile and socia...

The purpose of this article is to provide a better understanding of how to effectively develop design projects that simultaneously leverage industry and academic partners, participants from various disciplinary backgrounds, and various levels of expertise to solve complex problems. The article reports a single case of an ongoing project focused on...

The full potential of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) can only be achieved by combining the efforts and the knowledge of multiple entities. This is also true for the current efforts towards the application of data, communications and services to improve cycling and its integration into general mobility systems. The currently prevailing paradigm...

Bicycles equipped with sensors, processing capacity and communications can be a promising source of data about the personal and the collective reality of urban cycling. While this concept has been attracting considerable interest, the key assumption is the design of a closed system where a uniform set of sensing bicycles, with a concrete set of sen...

As cycling becomes increasingly important in sustainable mobility policies, there is also an urge for new digital applications and services for urban cycling. This new generation of cycling applications should be able to connect cyclists with their local cycling ecosystem, promote cycling, and empower cyclists to become active agents of urban mobil...

For many riders, the motorcycle is much more than a transportation mode. Riding a motorcycle can be a pleasurable experience in itself, and the motorcycle is frequently a tool of socialization. An evidence for that can be found in the numerous motorcycling communities around the world. However, those communities may not be accessible to everyone, o...

As cycling becomes increasingly important in sustainable mobility policies, there is also an urge for new digital applications and services for urban cycling. This new generation of cycling applications should be able to connect cyclists with their local cycling ecosystem, promote cycling, and empower cyclists to become active agents of urban mobil...

For many riders, the motorcycle is much more than a transportation mode. Riding a motorcycle can be a pleasurable experience in itself, and the motorcycle is frequently a tool of socialization. An evidence for that can be found in the numerous motorcycling communities around the world. However, those communities may not be accessible to everyone, o...

Information and Communication Technology is increasingly recognised as a key element for the ability of cycling mobility initiatives to create real, profound, incremental and measurable impact. Even though previous work has extensively explored many applications of smart cycling data, the first challenge is to actually produce consistent cycling da...

Cycling is increasingly popular as a sustainable urban mobility mode. Data can play a key role in the success of cycling promotion initiatives, by helping to understand cycling demand and assess the real impact of investments. However, creating a global view of the cycling activity of a city can be a major challenge, as there are no obvious sources...

Digital services are becoming an integral part of the city fabric and are increasingly central to the ways in which we collectively experience cities. In this work, we are particularly concerned with the infrastructural elements that cities may offer to enable a deeper connection with their inhabitants. Our research goal is to uncover emerging sign...

This proceedings presents the papers from Urb-IoT 2018 - 3rd EAI International Conference on IoT in Urban Space, which took place in Guimarães, Portugal on 21-22 November 2018. The conference aims to explore the emerging dynamics within the scope of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the new science of cities.The papers discuss fusion of heterogeneou...

Digital public displays can represent a powerful medium for personal expression and situated communication. However, before they can actually serve as an effective communication medium, they need to move towards more open models, in which user-generated content can play a more prominent role in their relevance and value proposition. The key challen...

With information technology becoming increasingly embedded in our everyday physical world, there is a growing set of mobile applications that involve a connection with the digital representation of physical places. This association is normally initiated with a check-in procedure, through which a person asserts her presence at a particular place and...

In this work, we reflect on the use of LED message sign displays as an enabling technology for multipurpose, dynamic and open display networks for urban environments. We argue that the specific affordances of message signs may provide the ground for the emergence of a new type of digital and locative outdoor media with the capability to serve relev...

The ubiquitous presence of ICT in our lives calls for professionals who have a deep understanding of technology, but who are also able to understand and frame the relevant contributions that are needed from many other disciplines. In this work, we report on our experience of teaching Ubiquitous Systems to ICT students. We argue that a course on Ubi...

A mobile application whose functionality is somehow based on the ability to connect to locative digital environments, needs to be able to bridge between its current location and a digital counterpart of its current place. This is normally envisioned as a simple proximate selection process, where the application searches the surrounding environment...

In this work, we seek to inform the design of general purpose place-based display systems by studying current usage of non-digital displays in semi-public places. We have studied 27 places of various types, analysing their visual display elements and uncovering the key motivations and the main practices behind those non-digital displays. A first re...

This paper presents a study developed in the framework of a training course for teachers of STEM areas on the JuxtaLearn process. This process, divided into eight steps, aims to improve student understanding of threshold concepts by planning, editing and sharing creative videos in CLIPIT. CLIPIT is an online platform for collaborative learning desi...

Digital public displays have a unique capability to enable situated shared experiences, especially when open to user-generated content from people in their vicinity. The challenge, however, is how to open public displays to user-generated content, while being able to efficiently support conformity with place and display owner expectations. Sharing...

Digital public displays are evolving towards becoming more ubiquitous, but also towards alternative media publication paradigms that challenge prevailing assumptions. In our work, we are particularly interested in the concept of place-based displays, which are managed independently by a local display owner to serve the communications goals of a spe...

Open Display Networks have the potential to allow many content creators to publish their media to an open-ended set of screen displays. However, this raises the issue of how to match that content to the right displays. In this study, we aim to understand how the perceived utility of particular media sharing scenarios is affected by three independen...

The open creation of applications is a fundamental step towards making public displays an open and creative communication medium. In this work, we describe the Displr platform for pervasive display infrastructures and particularly its application framework. The platform provides core services for managing place-based displays and an application fra...

Digital public displays can have a huge potential as a communication medium for individual creativity and self-expression. However, opening public displays to user-generated content and personalisation requires content publication practices that people may easily understand and appropriate according to their communication goals. This is crucial for...

This paper presents a study developed in the scope of a larger project that aims to understand how video editing and content sharing in public displays can be used at schools to promote the informal engagement of students with curricular contents that are essential to foster future learning. The study involved a video competition where students wer...

Open Display Networks represent a new paradigm for large scale networks of public displays that are open to applications and content from third parties. Web technologies may be particularly interesting as a technological framework for third-party application development in Open Display Networks because of their portability and widespread use. Howev...

Public displays are often strongly situated signs deeply embedded in their physical, social, and cultural setting. Understanding how the display is coupled with on-going situations, its level of situatedness, provides a key element for the interpretation of the displays themselves but is also an element for the interpretation of place, its situated...

JuxtaLearn is a research project focused on ‘performance’ as a means of provoking students’ understanding of science and technology through the creation and sharing of educational videos. As the videos will be shared in public displays, the Portuguese research team developed three workshops with twelve teachers from a Portuguese Secondary School re...

In this paper, we study the extent to which the presentation of pedagogical videos on a public display at a communal space of the school is able to promote engagement around those videos. The videos were produced by students from the school itself. Using a mobile application, students could rate, create comments or simply bookmark videos. The evalu...

In this work, we consider the scenario of an open display network in which people can post their content to a potentially large set of public displays. This raises the key challenge of how to associate that content with the displays that may provide a more meaningful context for its presentation. The main contribution of this work is a novel unders...

The introduction of an innovative technology in schools has the potential to change the education system, bringing major changes in the way teachers work, students learn challenging the way schools are managed. Informed by literature that sustains integration of technological innovations in educational contexts is influenced by instrumental factors...

Mobile payments still remain essentially an emerging technology, seeking to fill the gap between the envisioned potential and widespread usage. In this paper, we present an integrated mobile service solution based on the near field communication (NFC) protocol that was developed under a research project called MobiPag. The most distinctive characte...

We envision that future public display networks will be more interactive and open to applications from third parties similar to what we already have with smartphones. This paper investigates the application landscape for interactive public displays aiming to understand what would be the design and usage space for this type of applications. In parti...

Public displays are becoming increasingly interactive and a broad range of interaction mechanisms can now be used to create multiple forms of interaction. However, the lack of interaction abstractions forces each developer to create specific approaches for dealing with interaction, preventing users from building consistent expectations on how to in...

The information infrastructure that pervades urban environments represents a major opportunity for collecting information about Human mobility. However, this huge potential has been undermined by the overwhelming privacy risks that are associated with such forms of large scale sensing. In this research, we are concerned with the problem of how to e...

Open display networks represent a new paradigm for large scale networks of public displays that are open to applications and content from third party sources. Web technologies may be particularly interesting as a technological framework for third-party application development in open display networks because of their portability and widespread use....

The integration of digital technology into schools is facing substantial challenges. In this study, we address the roles that public displays in communal spaces at the school can play as an additional vehicle for learning practices and, particularly, as a medium for sharing educational videos created by students themselves. Using a participatory de...

A public display that is able to present the right information at the right time is a very compelling concept. However, realising or even approaching this ability to autonomously select appropriate content based on some interpretation of the surrounding social context represents a major challenge. This chapter provides an overview of the key challe...

The adoption of mobile payment systems is known to face multiple concerns regarding security, usability and value proposition. In this work, we start from the assumption that initial acceptance will always be weak because of the lack of an established usage frame. Instead, we focus on understanding how we can leverage upon the real contact with the...

Digital public displays can have a key role in urban ubiquitous computing infrastructures, but they have not yet managed to fill this role. A key step in that direction would be the emergence of an application model for open display networks that would enable anyone to create applications for display infrastructures. In this work, we study the deve...

This paper contributes to the understanding of how digital public displays can be utilized in schools taking into consideration educational goals. This work is part of a currently on-going research project that aims to promote students' curiosity in science and technology through creative film-making, collaborative editing activities, and content s...

Many aspects of the human experience of ubiquitous computing in built environments must be explored in the context of the target environment. However, delaying evaluation until a version of the system can be deployed can make redesign too costly. Prototypes have the potential to solve this problem by enabling evaluation before actual deployment. Th...

Mobile devices can be a powerful tool for interaction with public displays, but mobile applications supporting this form of interaction are not yet part of our everyday reality. There are no widely accepted abstractions, standards, or practices that may enable systematic interaction between mobile devices and public displays. We envision public dis...

Research involving public displays often faces the need to study the effects of a deployment in the wild. While many organizations have institutionalized processes for ensuring ethical compliance of such human subject experiments, these may fail to stimulate sufficient awareness for ethical issues among all project members. Some organizations even...

A public display that is able to present the right information at the right time is a very compelling concept. However, realising or even approaching this ability to autonomously select appropriate content based on some interpretation of the surrounding social context represents a major challenge. This article provides an overview of the key challe...

Public-display systems are still far from being a medium for meeting people's diverse communication goals. Moving toward open displays will require publication paradigms that can overcome the challenges of meaningful engagement and enable users to fully understand and control the publication process. The metaphors of pins and posters have inspired...

Today's digital signage systems typically show content that has been scheduled well in advance by their respective “owners”, i.e., companies or individuals who paid for and/or operate the public display. However, with the shift to open display networks that can obtain content from many sources and the corresponding advances in interaction and sensi...

Digital public displays have an enormous potential as a collaborative technology to socialize in public venues, especially when they are open to the participation of visitors. However, user-generated content is a form of control sharing that requires safeguards against the publication of content deemed inappropriate. In this work, we study the perc...

The creation of smart environments that are adaptive and responsive to the context in which they are being used has been one of the strongest ideas in ambient intelligence, but also one of the areas in which there seems to be a persistent gap between the initial promises and its real achievements. A possible reason why this is so challenging is tha...

This paper describes an exploratory study on the design space for mobile payments. The study aims at identifying how some features of potential systems may affect the end-user experience and the overall values associated with it. This work takes an interaction design perspective and is not particularly focused on usability or task efficiency issues...

Urban spaces are increasingly embedded with various types of public digital displays. Many of these displays can be subject to multi-user interactions and support a broad range of applications. A fundamental implication emerging from the interactive nature of those applications is that users should have access to appropriate selection and control t...

Experience sampling methods (ESM) are a commonly used technique for capturing information from real or potential technology usage. The ubiquity of mobile phones has created a particularly appealing opportunity for all sorts of ESM studies, but there are complex technical challenges involved. In this work, we have sought to understand those challeng...

Interaction is repeatedly pointed out as a key enabling element towards more engaging and valuable public displays. Still, most digital public displays today do not support any interactive features. We believe that this is mainly due to the lack of efficient and clear abstractions that developers can use to incorporate interactivity into their appl...

In this paper, we explore the viability and possible limitations of a delay-tolerant positioning process for location-based logging. Instead of estimating the device position on the device, a delay-tolerant technique stores the radio and Wi-Fi data needed to calculate that position, sends it to a server when appropriate, and it is the server that w...

In this paper, our objective is to report our findings in regard to the system support offered for building Ambient Intelligence environments and applications. The evaluation of system support for Ambient Intelligence is very difficult because we cannot find globally accepted metrics and because it is very difficult to evaluate large-scale and long...

Public displays are progressively embedded in urban settings. Such displays become elements of an integrated pervasive ecosystem in which various displays with multiple applications are accessed by multiple viewers. Still, many public displays employ content that is based on pre-defined schedules as encountered in conventional digital signage syste...

This paper presents a longitudinal user study that investigated the adoption of some Bluetooth based functionalities for a public digital display in a high school. More specifically, the utilization of Bluetooth device naming extended beyond social identity representation and introduced the use of a simple interaction mechanism. The interaction mec...

We propose a system which allows users to select how and with whom they are available for contact by managing a set of personal "identities" and budding relationships. The most important of these media are public displays, which allow a low-cost barrier for finding potential friends through interaction via the display and through the attendance of...

Human mobility has been widely studied for a variety of purposes, from urban planning to the study of spread of diseases. These studies depend heavily on large datasets, and recent advances in collaborative sensing and WiFi infrastructures have created new opportunities for generating that data. However, these methods and procedures require the par...

The ability to engage users in content generation is both a major goal and a major challenge for public displays. While previous work has extensively explored the specific challenges associated with interaction processes, little attention has been paid to the broad range of issues that go beyond interaction itself. More specifically, public displa...

Interaction is repeatedly pointed out as a key enabling element towards more engaging and valuable public displays. Still, most digital public displays today do not support any interactive features. We argue that this is mainly due to the lack of efficient and clear abstractions that developers can use to incorporate interactivity into their applic...

This paper presents ActivitySpot, a ubiquitous computing framework for supporting localized activities, i.e., activities strongly as-sociated to a specific physical environment, performed by occasional visitors. The ActivitySpot framework implements an activity-centered approach to ubiquitous computing, by defining a conceptual model in-spired by A...

Open public display networks could emerge as a new communications medium for the 21st century, but this transformation can only occur if the technology moves from its current, closed model to a new, open one.

In this paper, we discuss alternative paths towards system support for Pervasive Computing that are based on a balanced combination between global services and situated devices that we hypothesise will be the key to widespread deployment of Pervasive Computing: global services provide functionality that can be relevant anywhere, thus obviating the...

In this work, we explore how information services can be used to improve the travel experience in public transportation and reduce the perceived travel time. More specifically, we describe the creation of a mobile application for assisting passengers, which explores the integration of social networking features into the traveling experience. The ov...

Due to its pervasiveness and communication capabilities, Bluetooth can be used as an infrastructure for several situated interaction and massive sensing scenarios. This paper shows how Bluetooth scanning can be used in gate counting scenarios, where the main goal is to provide an accurate count for the number of unique devices sighted. To this end,...

Interaction is a key element in turning public displays into a platform for social interaction, making them more engaging and valuable. However, interactive features are still rare in public displays, due to the lack of generalised abstractions for incorporating interactivity. In our work, we explore to what extent the concept of interaction widget...

Displays technology experienced a considerable progress and screens are increasingly pervasive in public spaces. Most of the display systems exist as singular non-interactive units showing static images, power point presentations or product videos. Further developments will consider the possibility of connecting the displays towards the Pervasive D...

Advertising is often the key element in the business case for public display networks. However, this is still a limited medium in its support for key advertising concepts, such as targeting or impact assessment. This chapter analyses how the evolution of the medium is creating the opportunity for re-shaping advertising models for Digital Signage. I...

Watching TV in public locations is very different from watching at Home, but it can also be a worthy experience, especially in the context of certain collective events, such as live football. The increasingly rich features of iTV services may even provide the ground for making the Television infrastructure an alternative framework for the deploymen...

In this paper, we describe an approach for enabling digital photo frames to become generic interaction devices for the home. Their off-the-shelf nature and the simplicity of their interaction model can make photo frames a key element in the AAL eco-system. The motivating hypothesis for this work is that an externally managed image feed can be used...

In this paper, we explore the viability and possible limitations of a time-shifted positioning process for location-based logging in which we want to annotate certain events registered on a mobile phone with location data. Instead of estimating the position when the event occurs, the system stores the radio and Wi-Fi data. At some later stage, this...

Social Networking Sites (SNS) have an unprecedented ability to capture Human activity, including information about the specific physical settings in which those activities are taking place. This represents a major potential for uncovering, on a large scale, new knowledge about aggregate behaviors in the use of places. In this paper, we explore the...

The development and design of computational artifacts and their current widespread use in diverse contexts needs to take into account end-users needs, likes/dislikes and broader societal issues including human values. However, the fast pace of technological developments highlights that the process of defining the computational artifacts not only ne...

This paper describes a system for supporting coarse-grained location-based synchronisation. This type of synchronisation may occur when people need only some awareness about the location of others within the specific context of an on-going activity. We have identified a number of reference scenarios for this type of synchronisation and we have impl...

Improving the visiting experience of exhibitions and public spaces in general has been the subject of several studies over the past years. In the study presented here, we were particularly interested in understanding the potential of combining explicit and implicit interaction modes between virtual characters and visitors. We present in this paper...

In public display systems determine what to present and when is a central feature. Although several adaptive scheduling alternatives have been explored, which introduce sensibility of the display to some type of external variable, they are still very dependent on the user in their behavior, content specific in their nature and very rigid in their a...

Public digital displays could greatly benefit from the ability to dynamically select from the Internet content items that would be strongly related with the place where each display is installed. Generically, this is similar to the type of problem addressed by recommender systems. However, the usage context of a public display raises specific chall...

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) has emerged in the past 10 years as a multidisciplinary field within ubiquitous computing, attracting considerable research, funding and public attention and leading to many research groups, and conferences specifically focused on Ambient Intelligence topics. From its conception, AmI has always been a field strongly drive...

Public displays are an increasingly ubiquitous element of our sociodigital landscape with a strong potential to become key building blocks for AmI. For that purpose, they should have the ability to dynamically and autonomously select content from web sources according to the relevance of their content to the continuous flow of social settings aroun...

Advertising is often a key element in the business case for public display networks. However, the respective advertising models do not yet provide effective solutions to the key issues of campaign targeting and impact measurement that are now so common in web advertising. In this paper, we specifically discuss some of the directions and principles...

Several approaches for context-aware public display systems exist but none has been able to bridge the gap between the myriad of possible interactive features of a display and adaptation rules for its content. In this paper, we propose a framework of digital footprints generated by the interaction with public displays that can be used as a means to...

The development and design of computational artefacts and their widespread use in diverse contexts must take into account end-users needs, likes/dislikes and broader societal issues, including human values. However, the fast pace of technological developments highlight that the process of defining computational artefacts must incorporate not only t...

Dynamic sources, which make regularly updated data available for use by other applications, are increasingly a key enabling feature of the web. They are extensively used in all sorts of social media applications where they are re-combined in multiple ways to generate new aggregate services. Public situated displays are an emergent area where dynami...

Public digital displays are increasingly pervasive and an important enabling technology for many types of ubiquitous computing scenarios. Not only do they provide a simple and effective way of bringing digital information into our physical world, but their presence could also be a catalyst for situated interaction and the emergence of local user-ge...

The paradigm of proximity-based discovery and communication enabled by Bluetooth technology can be very relevant in Ambient Intelligence as an enabler for situated interaction. In this work, we explore the use of Bluetooth naming as a key driver for situated interaction around public displays. Our approach to the use of Bluetooth naming extends bey...

This paper presents an interaction model for pervasive computing environments supporting localized activities, i.e., activities strongly associated to a specific physical environment. We are particularly interested in activities performed by occasional visitors to public spaces. This interaction model is characterized by an activity-centered approa...