Sandra Gama

• PhD
• Researcher at Inesc-ID

Understanding which factors affect information visualization transparency continues to be one of the most relevant challenges in current research, especially since trust models how users build on the knowledge and use it. This work extends the current body of research by studying the user’s subjective evaluation of the visualization transparency of...

Recent research focuses on understanding what triggers cognitive biases and how to alleviate them in the context of visualization use. Given its role in decision-making in other research fields, the Phantom Effect may hold exciting prospects among known biases. The Phantom Effect belongs to the category of decoy effects, where the decoy is an optim...

Peer assessment has been widely studied as a replacement for traditional evaluation, not only by reducing the professors' workload but mainly by benefiting students' engagement and learning. Although several works successfully validate its accuracy and fairness, more research must be done on how students' pre-existing social relationships affect th...

Peer assessment has been widely studied as a replacement for traditional evaluation, not only by reducing the professors' workload but mainly by benefiting students' engagement and learning. Although several works successfully validate its accuracy and fairness, more research must be done on how students' pre-existing social relationships affect th...

Serious Games (SGs) offer significant potential in healthcare for disease assessment and intervention, enhancing patients’ quality of life. Exercise SGs, or Exergames, promote physical activity and mobility in a gamified environment, encouraging tailored exercises based on individual abilities and needs. Here, within the Horizon Europe iPROLEPSIS p...

Serious Games (SGs) have been explored in healthcare for their potential as gamified means for disease assessment and/or intervention. Designing effective SGs requires attention to user requirements and iterative development. We introduce a SG design process for Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) patients, aiming to enhance their quality of life. The latter...

Peer assessment has been widely studied as a replacement for traditional evaluation, not only by reducing the professor’s workload but mainly by benefiting students’ engagement and learning. Although several works successfully validate its accuracy and fairness, more research must be done on how students’ pre-existing social relationships affect th...

The anchoring effect is the over-reliance on an initial piece of information when making decisions. It is one of the most pervasive and robust biases. Recently, literature has focused on knowing how influential the anchoring effect is when applied to information visualization, with studies finding its reproducibility in the field. Despite the exten...

Global E-waste monitoring has revealed a concerning surge in e-waste generation, with millions of metric tons produced each year. This underscores the urgent need for heightened awareness and responsible management of electronic waste (e-waste), given the continuous influx of new information and communication technology (ICT) products, the rapid ob...

Recent research on information visualization has shown how individual differences such as personality mediate how users interact with visualization systems. Although there is a robust body of research on this relationship, these studies focus on a particular subset of personality constructs. Therefore, there are still personality traits with untapp...

Recent research has leveraged peer assessment as a grading system tool where learners are involved in learning and evaluation. However, there is limited knowledge regarding individual differences, such as personality, in peer assessment tasks. We analyze how personality factors affect the peer assessment dynamics of a semester-long remote learning...

Visual analytics combines automated analysis techniques with interactive visualizations for effective understanding, reasoning, and decision-making on complex data. However, accurately classifying sentiments and stances in sentiment analysis remains challenging due to ambiguity and individual differences. This survey examines 35 papers published be...

Visualisations in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are crucial for clinical care. Since clinicians need to quickly diagnose and treat their patients, having appropriate ways to visualise patients’ characteristics and issues documented in the EHR, can be instrumental. However, the existing literature has not yet summarised the characteristics and le...

Understanding how visualizations can support decision-making continues to be one of the most relevant challenges in current research. However, prior work provides limited knowledge regarding how the decision-maker profile and, in particular, psychological constructs affect decision-making. Weighing how conscientiousness affects one’s tendency to fo...

Gamification has been used to improve engagement in a variety of settings while improving overall results, which makes it a popular research topic nowadays. Notwithstanding, gamified systems must be designed carefully, correctly balancing game elements. Nevertheless, one-size-fits-all approaches are limited and do not guarantee absolute success. In...

Although designers aim at offering the best possible user experience, products are designed for a general audience with a common pool of characteristics. Since intrinsic psychological characteristics model the human interaction, ignoring that each individual has different experiences may lead to a failed product. From these constructs, personality...

The impact of individual differences, such as personality traits, on user performance and human behaviors has been studied in several fields of human–computer interaction, with a growing interest in information visualization. Although most visualizations are still designed with a universal approach, great strides have been made toward the developme...

Gaining insight is considered one of the relevant purposes of visual data exploration, yet studies that categorize insights are rare. This paper reports on a study to understand if the categorization model used to describe insights and personality factors affect insight-based evaluations' findings. Participants completed a set of tasks with three h...

Gamification can be defined as the use of game elements in non-game settings and has proven its role in enhancing engagement and improving overall outcomes. It is present in a myriad of market sectors, by implementing game mechanics within their processes to motivate and involve employers. Its success stems from its tight connection with psychologi...

The main challenge in higher education is student retention. Different methods have been proposed to overcome this challenge. In this paper, we propose a method for the early prediction of student final grades for a course using only their performance data in the current semester. It assists students to analyze how much effort they need to put into...

The concern with providing a good experience for users increases simultaneously with technological evolution and dissemination. Different evaluation methods are presented in the literature to help developers evaluate and verify the interfaces they develop. However, for the application of evaluation methods, it is often necessary to have an expert,...

Despite the historical limitations associated with the study of marine species, current technology makes it possible to collect ocean animal data in a more accessible way, with a variety of tagging and tracking devices. Hence, such information is nowadays generated in large amounts, often in textual formats, making it difficult to interpret and ana...

With the ubiquity of technology, we have nowadays, many processes have taken advantage of information technology mechanisms to leverage their outcomes. Education is not an exception. In fact, technology has been playing an increasingly important part in learning experiences. For instance, game elements have been effectively used in educational sett...

Previous literature has shown that social identity influences consumer decision-making towards branded products. However, its influence on ones’ own sensory perception of an ingroup (or outgroup) associated brand’s product (i.e. sponsor) is seldom documented and little understood. Here, we investigate the impact of social identity (i.e. team identi...

Gamified learning aims to motivate students using game elements. Although gamification can enhance students’ enjoyment and engagement, it is unclear how different students behave in and interact with gamified contexts. To this end, we analyze how different students interact with a gamified course. We devised such an experimental course on Multimedi...

This dataset contains the Five-Factor Model traits and their facets, the Locus of Control dimensions, and preferences for each participant. Additionally, we collected the apparatus used to fill-in the questionnaire and whether participants used eye correction apparatus.

Large amounts of subtitles, from movies and TV shows, can be easily found on the web, for free, in almost every language. Several corpora, built from subtitles, with different annotations and purposes, are currently available. Considering that new sets of subtitles are constantly being released, we propose B-Subtle, an open source framework that al...

Recent research on information visualization has shown how individual differences act as a mediator on how users interact with visualization systems. We focus our exploratory study on whether personality has an effect on user preferences regarding idioms used for hierarchy, evolution over time, and comparison contexts. Specifically, we leverage all...

Recent research on information visualization has shown how individual differences act as a mediator on how users interact with visualization systems. We focus our exploratory study on whether personality has an effect on user preferences regarding idioms used for hierarchy, evolution over time, and comparison contexts. Specifically, we leverage all...

A current topic of Human-Computer Interaction focuses on understanding and assessing user-centered design taking into account certain psychological factors related to users’ thought processes, feelings and behavior into account. In particular, personality is an idiosyncratic psychological construct that captures many of such aspects from a user. It...

Individual differences play a major role in human-computer interaction. In particular, personality shapes how we process and act on the world, and how users perceive and accept technology. Nevertheless, there is limited evidence on the impact of different personality types in graphical user interfaces (GUI). Moreover, there is limited work on impli...

In this paper we develop design guidelines for mental state induction in first-person shooters (FPS). To illustrate our design guidelines, we develop four versions of a first-person shooter video game each inducing a specific mental state on the player following our guidelines. We also conduct an evaluation using the self-perceived mental state of...

Despite the historical limitations associated with the study of marine species, current technology makes it possible to collect ocean animal data in a more accessible way, with a variety of tagging and tracking devices. Hence, such information is nowadays generated in large amounts, often in textual formats, making it difficult to interpret and ana...

This work studies the relevance of flow in gameplay adaptability and how it may offer a better gaming experience, since it provides a better enjoyment of an activity. We developed a first-person shooter video game that adapts its in-game difficulty and environmental settings based on a representation of the mental state of the user to keep a balanc...

With the increase in the number of students worldwide, it has become difficult for teachers to track their students or even for institutions themselves to identify anomalies in degrees and courses. The sheer amount of data makes such an analysis a daunting task. A possible solution to overcome this problem is the use of interactive information visu...

Color is a characteristic of human visual perception that is present in everything. Color models are the way to represent the range of all possible colors that come from the color combination of the primary colors of the model, like RGB model. However, colors are not just perceptions, they are connected to a psychological meaning influenced by cult...

Gamified learning is a novel concept that according to recent studies, can increase student activity and improve learning outcomes. However, little is known about how different students experience and are engaged by it. We present a long-term study which identified distinct behavioral and performance patterns in participants taking a gamified colle...

State of the art research shows that gamified learning can be used to engage students and help them perform better. However, most studies use a one-size-fits-all approach to gamification, where individual differences and needs are ignored. In a previous study, we identified four types of students attending a gamified college course, characterized b...

The use of educational datamining techniques to elicit patterns in student behavior and learning outcomes can be a useful for the analysis of the effectiveness of teaching strategies and the coordination of study programs. However, results from those techniques are, often, large sets of symbolic patterns, numbering in the thousands, usually present...

Gamification has been explored recently as a way to promote content delivery in education, yielding promising results. However, little is known regarding how it helps different students experience learning and acquire knowledge. In this paper we study and analyze data from a gamified engineering course, to search for distinct behavior patterns. We...

In Classical Greece the design and construction of buildings were interconnected,forming a single activity. With the development of knowledge and technology, thisprocess has fragmented, giving rise to different activities, performed by variousprofessionals, such as the architect, the engineer and the builder, leading toproblems related with informa...

Gamification of education is a recent trend, and early experiments showed promising results. Students seem not only to perform better, but also to participate more and to feel more engaged with gamified learning. However, little is known regarding how different students are affected by gamification and how their learning experience may vary. In thi...

A successful analysis of educational processes may help enhance success. Data Mining techniques, despite allowing analysis of such data, result in an extensive set of symbolic patterns that are difficult to understand. Visualization may overcome this limitation due to its potential to display large quantities of data while alleviating cognitive loa...

Visualization provides the means for a natural information interpretation with low cognitive loads. In such context, color is a powerful way to convey information properties. One use of color in visualization is color blending, in which distinct colors represent different data properties and one data item which verifies more than one property is re...

Gamified education is a novel concept, and early trials show its potential to engage students and improve their performance. However, little is known about how different students learn with gamification, and how their gaming habits influence their experience. In this paper we present a study where data regarding student performance and gaming prefe...

Gamification of education is a recent trend, and early experiments showed promising results. Students seem not only to perform better, but also to participate more and to feel more engaged with gamified learning. However, little is known regarding how different students are affected by gamification and how their learning experience may vary. In thi...

Providing the educational community with tools to analyze educational processes may result in a more effective education. Application of Data Mining techniques to educational data results in information on educational settings. However, to comprehend an extensive set of symbolic patterns that is usually difficult to understand. Visualization, due...

Visualization is a powerful way to convey data, showing potential for joining and interrelating data items. However, when dealing with large amounts of data, visually merging different classes of information poses several challenges. Color, however, due to its effectiveness for labeling and categorizing information, may be a solution to this shortc...

Nowadays, electronic devices are part of our daily routines, resulting in information generation at virtually any time and context. Due to different styles of interaction, data produced by human activities is not only in considerable quantities, but it is also extremely rich, which makes it difficult to manage and analyze. Visualization has the pot...

Games are of great interest in education. Their motivational qualities make players more persistent and resilient. In particular, virtual environments have proven to be good learning engagers, as they generate opportunities to create, explore and communicate. Here we present an exploratory study on how student autonomy and creativity can be improve...

In this paper we explore how gamification can be applied to education in order to improve student engagement. We present a study in which a college course was gamified, by including experience points, levels, badges, challenges and leaderboards. The study was five years long, where the first three were non-gamified years, and the last two regarded...

Well-designed games are good motivators by nature, as they imbue players with clear goals and a sense of reward and fulfillment, thus encouraging them to persist and endure in their quests. Recently, this motivational power has started to be applied to non- game contexts, a practice known as Gamification. This adds gaming elements to non-game proce...

Good games are good motivators by nature, as they make players feel rewarded and fulfilled, which pushes them forward to persist and resist frustration. Gamification is a novel technique that uses game elements like points and badges, to motivated and engage users into embracing new behaviors, such as improving one’s health condition, finances or p...

Well-designed games are good motivators by nature, as they imbue players with clear goals and a sense of reward and fulfillment, thus encouraging them to persist and endure in their quests. Recently, this motivational power has started to be applied to non-game contexts, a practice known as Gamification. This adds gaming elements to non-game proces...

Conversational agents have been subject of extensive research. An increasingly wider number of such agents simulate affective behavior in order to convey familiarity and increase believability. Nevertheless, the evolution of social relationships among people occurs gradually and the degree of intimacy associated with such relationships regulates pe...

Over the last decade extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational agents focusing in many different aspects of these agents. In this research, and aiming at building agents that maintain a social connection with users, empathy has been one of those areas, as it plays a leading role in the establishment of social relationships...

Interacting with computers has become part of our daily lives. This interaction results in large amounts of personal information, spread throughout places and applications. As a consequence, it is quite difficult to get an overall view of all our information or to find a specific item we are looking for. A meaningful visualization technique may be...