publications | Marcos Baez

2024

Understanding how early-stage researchers leverage socio-technical affordances for distributed research support

Yuchao Jiang, Boualem Benatallah, and Marcos Baez

Information and Software Technology, 2024

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Early-stage researchers (ESRs) are often challenged to learn research skills with sufficient support from a small circle of advisors and colleagues. Meanwhile, emerging socio-technical systems (STSs) are now available for social interactions among the general public and people in particular interest topics, such as research. However, how STSs can effectively support ESRs in developing research skills is not yet well understood. In this paper, we report on a series of interviews and surveys with ESRs. We found that online research communities held the potentials for ESRs to learn from diverse perspectives and experience. But the adoption of research communities for learning was still limited. We identified unmet needs in the design of these systems limiting the adoption. We then provide design implications for future STSs to support learning research skills with socio-technical affordances.

2023

Walking Down the Road to Independent Mobility: An Adaptive Route Training System for the Cognitively Impaired

Konstantin Rink, Tristan Gruschka, Patrick Palsbröker, and 5 more authors

In 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS), May 2023

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In this paper we describe the design and development of a route training system for individuals with cognitive impairments (CIs) living in residential care facilities. Learning to move autonomously in public spaces is a fundamental skill for people with CI, who face several challenges to independently and safely move around. Yet, exploring opportunities for route training support, especially in residential settings, has received very little attention. To explore these opportunities, we followed a design and development process based on inclusive design practices that considered the organisational context and aimed at involving people with CI in the software design. To ensure our solution addressed the identified needs and abilities of this heterogeneous population, we further framed the route training definition as a design process that is enacted by the system, making the trainer and user co-creators of a personalised training. In this paper we report on the needs and challenges for mobility training in residential settings, introduce the design and formative evaluation of the route training system, to conclude with reflections and considerations on our methodological approach.
Defining Patterns for a Conversational Web

Emanuele Pucci, Isabella Possaghi, Claudia Maria Cutrupi, and 3 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Hamburg, Germany, May 2023

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Conversational agents are emerging as channels for a natural and accessible interaction with digital services. Their benefits span across a wide range of usage scenarios and address visual impairments and any situational impairments that may take advantage of voice-based interactions. A few works highlighted the potential and the feasibility of adopting conversational agents for making the Web truly accessible for everyone. Yet, there is still a lack of concrete guidance in designing conversational experiences for browsing the Web. This paper illustrates a human-centered process that involved 26 blind and visually impaired people to investigate their difficulties when using assistive technology for accessing the Web, and their attitudes and preferences on adopting conversational agents. In response to the identified challenges, the paper introduces patterns for conversational Web browsing. It also discusses design implications that can promote Conversational AI as a technology to enhance Web accessibility.
Adaptive search query generation and refinement in systematic literature review

Maisie Badami, Boualem Benatallah, and Marcos Baez

Information Systems, May 2023

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Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) are a central part of evidence-based research, which involves collecting and integrating empirical evidence on specific research questions. A key step in this process is building Boolean search queries, which are at the core of information retrieval systems that support literature search. This involves turning general research aims into specific search terms that can be combined into complex Boolean expressions. Researchers must build and refine search queries to ensure they have sufficient coverage and properly represent the literature. In this paper, we propose an adaptive query generation and refinement pipeline for SLR search that uses reinforcement learning to learn the optimal modifications to a query based on feedback from researchers about its performance. Empirical evaluations with 10 SLR datasets showed our approach achieves comparable performance to queries manually composed by SLR authors. We also investigate the impact of design decisions on the performance of the query generation and refinement pipeline. Specifically, we study the effects of the type of input seed, the use of general versus domain-specific word embedding models, the sampling strategy for relevance feedback, and number of iterations in the refinement process. Our results provide insights into the effects of these choices on the pipeline’s performance.
Rsourcer: Scaling Feedback on Research Drafts

Yuchao Jiang, Boualem Benatallah, and Marcos Baez

In Intelligent Information Systems, May 2023

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Effective feedback is crucial for early-stage researchers (ESRs) to develop their research skills. While feedback from supervisors and colleagues is important, additional feedback from external helpers can be beneficial. However, obtaining diverse and high-quality feedback outside of a research group can be challenging. In this work, we designed and prototyped Rsourcer, a crowdsourcing-based pipeline that simplifies the process of requesting, offering, evaluating, and adopting feedback. We evaluated Rsourcer with a concept validation study and a pilot study, which showed its potential. This work contributes with insights into crowdsourcing support with social technologies and extends research on scaling support for skills development.
Towards Scaling External Feedback for Early-Stage Researchers: A Survey Study

Yuchao Jiang, Marcos Baez, and Boualem Benatallah

In Cooperative Information Systems: 29th International Conference, CoopIS 2023, Groningen, The Netherlands, October 30-November 3, 2023, Proceedings, Groningen, The Netherlands, May 2023

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Feedback on research artefacts from people beyond local research groups, such as researchers in online research communities, has the potential to bring in additional support for early-stage researchers and complementary viewpoints to research projects. While current literature has focused primarily on early-stage research seeking or getting support for research skills development in general, less is known about, more specifically, empirical understanding of how early-stage researchers exchange feedback with external researchers. In this paper, we focus on understanding the critical types of external feedback that early-stage researchers desire and the prevalent challenges they face with exchanging feedback with external helpers. We report on a large-scale survey conducted with early-stage researchers of diverse backgrounds. Our findings lay the empirical foundation for informing the designing of socio-technical systems for research feedback exchange.

2022

Exploring challenges for Conversational Web Browsing with Blind and Visually Impaired Users

Marcos Baez, Claudia Maria Cutrupi, Maristella Matera, and 5 more authors

In Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New Orleans, LA, USA, May 2022

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Conversational AI is changing the way we interact with digital services. However, there is still a lack of conversational paradigms facilitating access to the Web. This paper discusses a new approach for Conversational Web Browsing, and introduces a design space identified through a user-centered process that involved 26 blind and visually impaired users. The paper also illustrates the conceptual architecture of a software framework that can automatically generate conversational agents for the Conversational Web.
🏆 Context knowledge-aware recognition of composite intents in task-oriented human-bot conversations

In Advanced Information Systems Engineering, May 2022

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Best paper award at CAiSE 2022

Task-oriented dialogue systems employ third-party APIs to serve end-users via natural language interactions. while existing advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques have produced promising and useful results to recognize user intents, the synthesis of API calls to support a broad range of potentially complex user intents is still largely a manual and costly process. In this paper, we propose a new approach to recognize and realize complex user intents. Our approach relies on a new rule-based technique that leverages both (i) natural language features extracted using existing NLP and ML techniques and (ii) contextual knowledge to capture the different classes of complex intents. We devise a context knowledge service to capture the requisite contextual knowledge.
Systematic literature review search query refinement pipeline: Incremental enrichment and adaptation

Maisie Badami, Boualem Benatallah, and Marcos Baez

In Advanced Information Systems Engineering, May 2022

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Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) are at the heart of evidence-based research, collecting and integrating empirical evidence regarding specific research questions. A leading step in the search for relevant evidence is composing Boolean search queries, which are still at the core of how information retrieval systems work to perform an advanced literature search. Building these queries thus requires going from the general aims of the research questions into actionable search terms that are combined into potentially complex Boolean expressions. Researchers are thus tasked with the daunting and challenging task of building and refining search queries in their quest for sufficient coverage and proper representation of the literature. In this paper, we propose an adaptive Boolean query generation and refinement pipeline for SLR search. Our approach utilizes a reinforcement learning technique to learn the optimal modifications for a query based on the feedback collecting from the researchers about the query retrieval performance. Empirical evaluations with 10 SLR datasets showed our approach to achieve comparable performance to that of queries manually composed by SLR authors.
Crowdsourcing syntactically diverse paraphrases with diversity-aware prompts and workflows

Jorge Ramı́rez, Marcos Baez, Auday Berro, and 2 more authors

In Advanced Information Systems Engineering, May 2022

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Task-oriented bots (or simply bots) enable humans to perform tasks in natural language. For example, to book a restaurant or check the weather. Crowdsourcing has become a prominent approach to build datasets for training and evaluating task-oriented bots, where the crowd grows an initial seed of utterances through paraphrasing, i.e., reformulating a given seed into semantically equivalent sentences. In this context, the resulting diversity is a relevant dimension of high-quality datasets, as diverse paraphrases capture the many ways users may express an intent. Current techniques, however, are either based on the assumption that crowd-powered paraphrases are naturally diverse or focus only on lexical diversity. In this paper, we address an overlooked aspect of diversity and introduce an approach for guiding the crowdsourcing process towards paraphrases that are syntactically diverse. We introduce a workflow and novel prompts that are informed by syntax patterns to elicit paraphrases avoiding or incorporating desired syntax. Our empirical analysis indicates that our approach yields higher syntactic diversity, syntactic novelty and more uniform pattern distribution than state-of-the-art baselines, albeit incurring on higher task effort.
Supporting Natural Language Interaction with the Web

Marcos Baez, Cinzia Cappiello, Claudia M. Cutrupi, and 5 more authors

In Web Engineering: 22nd International Conference, ICWE 2022, Bari, Italy, July 5–8, 2022, Proceedings, May 2022

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Conversational AI is disrupting the way information is accessed. However, there is still a lack of conversational technologies leveraging the Web. This paper introduces an approach to support the notion of Conversational Web Browsing. It illustrates design patterns for navigating websites through conversation and shows how such patterns are sustained by a Web architecture that integrates NLP technologies.
Process-oriented intents: a cornerstone for superimposition of natural language conversations over composite services

Sara Bouguelia, Auday Berro, Boualem Benatallah, and 4 more authors

In Service-Oriented Computing, May 2022

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Task-oriented conversational assistants are in very high demand these days. They employ third-party APIs to serve end-users via natural language interactions and improve their productivity. Recently, the augmentation of process-enabled automation with conversational assistants emerged as a promising technology to make process automation closer to users. This paper focuses on the superimposition of task-oriented assistants over composite services. We propose a Human-bot-Process interaction acts that are relevant to represent natural language conversations between the user and multi-step processes. In doing so, we enable human users to perform tasks by naturally interacting with processes.

2021

Chatbot Integration in Few Patterns

Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel, Fabio Casati, and 1 more author

IEEE Internet Computing, May 2021

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Chatbots are software agents that are able to interact with humans in natural language. Their intuitive interaction paradigm is expected to significantly reshape the software landscape of tomorrow, while already today chatbots are invading a multitude of scenarios and contexts. This article takes a developer’s perspective, identifies a set of architectural patterns that capture different chatbot integration scenarios, and reviews state-of-the-art development aids.
On the impact of predicate complexity in crowdsourced classification tasks

Jorge Ramı́rez, Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, and 4 more authors

In Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, Virtual Event, Israel, May 2021

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This paper explores and offers guidance on a specific and relevant problem in task design for crowdsourcing: how to formulate a complex question used to classify a set of items. In micro-task markets, classification is still among the most popular tasks. We situate our work in the context of information retrieval and multi-predicate classification, i.e., classifying a set of items based on a set of conditions. Our experiments cover a wide range of tasks and domains, and also consider crowd workers alone and in tandem with machine learning classifiers. We provide empirical evidence into how the resulting classification performance is affected by different predicate formulation strategies, emphasizing the importance of predicate formulation as a task design dimension in crowdsourcing.
🏆 On How Cognitive Computing Will Plan Your Next Systematic Review

Maisie Badami, Marcos Baez, Shayan Zamanirad, and 1 more author

In Service-Oriented Computing – ICSOC 2020 Workshops, May 2021

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Honorable mention at the Workshop on AI-enabled Process Automation at ICSOC 2020

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) are at the heart of evidence-based research, setting the foundation for future research and practice. However, producing good quality timely contributions is a challenging and highly cognitive endeavor, which has lately motivated the exploration of automation and support in the SLR process. In this paper we address an often overlooked phase in this process, that of planning literature reviews, and explore under the lenses of cognitive process augmentation how to overcome its most salient challenges. In doing so, we report on the insights from 24 SLR authors on planning practices, its challenges as well as feedback on support strategies inspired by recent advances in cognitive computing. We frame our findings under the cognitive augmentation framework, and report on a prototype implementation and evaluation focusing on further informing the technical feasibility.
Chatbots as conversational healthcare services

Mladjan Jovanovic, Marcos Baez, and Fabio Casati

IEEE Internet Computing, May 2021

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Chatbots are emerging as a promising platform for accessing and delivering healthcare services. The evidence is in the growing number of publicly available chatbots aiming at taking an active role in the provision of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment services. This article takes a closer look at how these emerging chatbots address design aspects relevant to healthcare service provision, emphasizing the human–AI interaction aspects and the transparency in AI automation and decision making.
Cognitive Augmentation in Processes

Moshe Chai Barukh, Shayan Zamanirad, Marcos Baez, and 6 more authors

Next-Gen Digital Services. A Retrospective and Roadmap for Service Computing of the Future: Essays Dedicated to Michael Papazoglou on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday and His Retirement, May 2021

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We present a vision for the next generation of process technology based on cognitive augmentation. Starting from current process technology, we show how by augmenting layers of cognitive intelligence to combine advances in machine-automation, crowdsourcing and more importantly adaptation and reasoning, we can advance support for emerging requirements of highly changing environments. We believe the challenges lie in the synergy between human and machine, in understanding how to orchestrate and combine their contributions. This vision paper sets forth a roadmap for future research by introducing a framework for cognitive augmentation, identifying the relevant research and technologies, and discussing its application amidst real-world use cases.
Dialogue Management in Conversational Systems: A Review of Approaches, Challenges, and Opportunities

Hayet Brabra, Marcos Baez, Boualem Benatallah, and 3 more authors

IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, May 2021

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Attracted by their easy-to-use interfaces and captivating benefits, conversational systems have been widely embraced by many individuals and organizations as side-by-side digital co-workers. They enable the understanding of user needs, expressed in natural language, and on fulfilling such needs by invoking the appropriate backend services (e.g., APIs). Controlling the conversation flow, known as Dialogue Management, is one of the essential tasks in conversational systems and the key to its success and adoption as well. Nevertheless, designing scalable and robust dialogue management techniques to effectively support intelligent conversations remains a deeply challenging problem. This article studies dialogue management from an in-depth design perspective. We discuss the state-of-the-art approaches, identify their recent advances and challenges, and provide an outlook on future research directions. Thus, we contribute to guiding researchers and practitioners in selecting the appropriate dialogue management approach aligned with their objectives, among the variety of approaches proposed so far.
Reusable Abstractions and Patterns for Recognising Compositional Conversational Flows

Sara Bouguelia, Hayet Brabra, Shayan Zamanirad, and 3 more authors

In Advanced Information Systems Engineering, May 2021

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Task-oriented conversational bots allow users to access services and perform tasks through natural language conversations. However, integrating these bots and software-enabled services has not kept pace with our ability to deploy individual devices and services. The main drawbacks of current bots and services integration techniques stem from the inherent development and maintenance cost. In addition, existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques automate various tasks but the synthesis of API calls to support broad range of potentially complex user intents is still largely a manual and costly process. In this paper, we propose three types of reusable patterns for recognising compositional conversational flows and therefore automatically support increased complexity and expressivity during the conversation.
🏆 On the State of Reporting in Crowdsourcing Experiments and a Checklist to Aid Current Practices

Jorge Ramı́rez, Burcu Sayin, Marcos Baez, and 4 more authors

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Oct 2021

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Methods Recognition award at CSCW 2021

Crowdsourcing is being increasingly adopted as a platform to run studies with human subjects. Running a crowdsourcing experiment involves several choices and strategies to successfully port an experimental design into an otherwise uncontrolled research environment, e.g., sampling crowd workers, mapping experimental conditions to micro-tasks, or ensure quality contributions. While several guidelines inform researchers in these choices, guidance of how and what to report from crowdsourcing experiments has been largely overlooked. If under-reported, implementation choices constitute variability sources that can affect the experiment’s reproducibility and prevent a fair assessment of research outcomes. In this paper, we examine the current state of reporting of crowdsourcing experiments and offer guidance to address associated reporting issues. We start by identifying sensible implementation choices, relying on existing literature and interviews with experts, to then extensively analyze the reporting of 171 crowdsourcing experiments. Informed by this process, we propose a checklist for reporting crowdsourcing experiments.
An Extensible and Reusable Pipeline for Automated Utterance Paraphrases

Auday Berro, Mohammad-Ali Yaghub Zade, Marcos Baez, and 2 more authors

Proc. VLDB Endow., Jul 2021

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In this demonstration paper we showcase an extensible and reusable pipeline for automatic paraphrase generation, i.e., reformulating sentences using different words. Capturing the nuances of human language is fundamental to the effectiveness of Conversational AI systems, as it allows them to deal with the different ways users can utter their requests in natural language. Traditional approaches to utterance paraphrasing acquisition, such as hiring experts or crowd-sourcing, involve processes that are often costly or time consuming, and with their own trade-offs in terms of quality. Automatic paraphrasing is emerging as an attractive alternative that promises a fast, scalable and cost-effective process. In this paper we showcase how our extensible and reusable pipeline for automated utterance paraphrasing can support the development of Conversational AI systems by integrating and extending existing techniques under an unified and configurable framework.
Understanding How Early-Stage Researchers Perceive External Research Feedback

Yuchao Jiang, Marcos Baez, and Boualem Benatallah

In ACM Collective Intelligence Conference 2021, Jul 2021

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In this paper, we report on an online survey to answer two questions: (i) What are the types of external feedback that are in stongest need and perceived to be most useful by ESRs? and (ii) What are the top challenges and barriers in getting and adopting external feedback on research for ESRs?
Crowdsourcing Diverse Paraphrases for Training Task-oriented Bots

Jorge Ramı́rez, Auday Berro, Marcos Baez, and 2 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.09420, Jul 2021

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A prominent approach to build datasets for training task-oriented bots is crowd-based paraphrasing. Current approaches, however, assume the crowd would naturally provide diverse paraphrases or focus only on lexical diversity. In this WiP we addressed an overlooked aspect of diversity, introducing an approach for guiding the crowdsourcing process towards paraphrases that are syntactically diverse.
Future directions for chatbot research: an interdisciplinary research agenda

Asbjørn Følstad, Theo Araujo, Effie Lai-Chong Law, and 8 more authors

Computing, Jul 2021

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Chatbots are increasingly becoming important gateways to digital services and information—taken up within domains such as customer service, health, education, and work support. However, there is only limited knowledge concerning the impact of chatbots at the individual, group, and societal level. Furthermore, a number of challenges remain to be resolved before the potential of chatbots can be fully realized. In response, chatbots have emerged as a substantial research area in recent years. To help advance knowledge in this emerging research area, we propose a research agenda in the form of future directions and challenges to be addressed by chatbot research. This proposal consolidates years of discussions at the CONVERSATIONS workshop series on chatbot research. Following a deliberative research analysis process among the workshop participants, we explore future directions within six topics of interest: (a) users and implications, (b) user experience and design, (c) frameworks and platforms, (d) chatbots for collaboration, (e) democratizing chatbots, and (f) ethics and privacy. For each of these topics, we provide a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss key research challenges, and suggest promising directions for future research. The six topics are detailed with a 5-year perspective in mind and are to be considered items of an interdisciplinary research agenda produced collaboratively by avid researchers in the field.
Automated Paraphrase Generation with Over-Generation and Pruning Services

Auday Berro, Marcos Baez, Boualem Benatallah, and 2 more authors

In Service-Oriented Computing: 19th International Conference, ICSOC 2021, Virtual Event, November 22–25, 2021, Proceedings 19, Jul 2021

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Conversational services are emerging as a new paradigm for accessing information by simply uttering questions in natural language, posing a whole new set of challenges to the design and engineering of information systems. Training conversational services to deal with the nuances of natural language often requires collecting a high-quality and diverse set of training samples (i.e., paraphrases). Traditional approaches such as hiring an expert or crowdsourcing involve data collection processes that are often costly and time-consuming. Automated paraphrase generation is a promising cost-effective and scalable approach to generating training samples. Current automatic techniques, however, tend to specialise in specific types of lexical or syntactic variations. As a result, generated paraphrases may not perform well in relevant quality aspects such as diversity and semantic relatedness. In this paper, we follow an approach inspired by services integration to address these issues and generate paraphrases in English that are semantically relevant and diverse. We propose an extensible and reusable pipeline that combines automatic paraphrasing techniques in a two-step process that first focus on i) leveraging the strengths of multiple techniques to generate the most diverse (and possibly noisy) set of paraphrases, to then ii) address common quality issues in a separate step. Through empirical evaluations we show the benefits of the two-step process design and of combining techniques for more balancing relevance and diversity.

2020

Effects of Sharing Old Pictures With Grandchildren on Intergenerational Relationships: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial

Zoljargalan Gantumur, Marcos Baez, Nomin-Erdene Ulamnemekh, and 4 more authors

JMIR Research Protocols, Jul 2020

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Background: Intergenerational relationships are beneficial for both grandparents and grandchildren. A positive grandparent-grandchild relationship can improve the psychological well-being of older adults and be a source of social support, family history, and identity development. Maintaining meaningful interactions can be, however, a challenging endeavor, especially as life events lead to relocating geographically. Grandparents and grandchildren can have different preferences in terms of communication mediums and different assumptions about the real conversational needs of the other. Objective: In this study, we will investigate the feasibility and effect of sharing memories of older adults with their grandchildren in social media. This intervention focuses on bringing snippets of the lives of the grandparents into the grandchildren’s social media feed and analyzing the potential effect on relational quality, relational investment, and conversational resources from the perspective of the grandchildren. Methods: A randomized controlled trial will be used to measure the effectiveness of sharing family memories through social media on intergenerational relationships from the perspective of the grandchildren. The study will be implemented in Mongolia among 60 grandparent-grandchild pairs who will be assigned to either a control or intervention group. Pictures and stories will be collected during reminiscence sessions between the researchers and the grandparents before the intervention. During an intervention period of 2 months, grandchildren in the intervention group will receive pictures and stories of their grandparents on their social media account. Pre- and postintervention questionnaires will measure relationship quality, relationship investment, and conversational resources and will be used to assess the effectiveness of the intervention. Results: We conducted a pretest pilot from January to April 2018 among 6 pairs of participants (6 grandparents and 6 grandchildren). The validation of the protocol was focused on the process, instruments, and technological setup. We continued the study after the validation, and 59 pairs of participants (59 grandparents and 59 grandchildren) have been recruited. The data collection was completed in November 2019. Conclusions: The results of this study will contribute to strategies to stimulate social interactions in intergenerational pairs. A validation of the study process is also presented to provide further operational recommendations. The lessons learned during the validation of the protocol are discussed with recommendations and implications for the recruitment, reminiscence sessions, technological setup, and administration of instruments. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/16315
A Systematic Review on Technology-Supported Interventions to Improve Old-Age Social Wellbeing: Loneliness, Social Isolation, and Connectedness

Francisco Ibarra, Marcos Baez, Luca Cernuzzi, and 1 more author

Journal of Healthcare Engineering, Jul 2020

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Background. This review studies technology-supported interventions to help older adults, living in situations of reduced mobility, overcome loneliness, and social isolation. The focus is on long-distance interactions, investigating the (i) challenges addressed and strategies applied; (ii) technology used in interventions; and (iii) social interactions enabled. Methods. We conducted a search on Elsevier’s Scopus database for related work published until January 2020, focusing on (i) intervention studies supported mainly by technology-mediated communication, (ii) aiming at supported virtual social interactions between people, and (iii) evaluating the impact of loneliness or social isolation. Results. Of the 1178 papers screened, 25 met the inclusion criteria. Computer and Internet training was the dominant strategy, allowing access to communication technologies, while in recent years, we see more studies aiming to provide simple, easy-to-use technology. The technology used was mostly off-the-shelf, with fewer solutions tailored to older adults. Social interactions targeted mainly friends and family, and most interventions focused on more than one group of people. Discussion. All interventions reported positive results, suggesting feasibility. However, more research is needed on the topic (especially randomized controlled trials), as evidenced by the low number of interventions found. We recommend more rigorous methods, addressing human factors and reporting technology usage in future research.
Automatic Generation of Chatbots for Conversational Web Browsing

Pietro Chittò, Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel, and 1 more author

In Conceptual Modeling: 39th International Conference, ER 2020, Vienna, Austria, November 3–6, 2020, Proceedings 39, Jul 2020

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In this paper, we describe the foundations for generating a chatbot out of a website equipped with simple, bot-specific HTML annotations. The approach is part of what we call conversational web browsing, i.e., a dialog-based, natural language interaction with websites. The goal is to enable users to use content and functionality accessible through rendered UIs by “talking to websites” instead of by operating the graphical UI using keyboard and mouse. The chatbot mediates between the user and the website, operates its graphical UI on behalf of the user, and informs the user about the state of interaction. We describe the conceptual vocabulary and annotation format, the supporting conversational middleware and techniques, and the implementation of a demo able to deliver conversational web browsing experiences through Amazon Alexa.
🏆 DREC: towards a Datasheet for Reporting Experiments in Crowdsourcing

Jorge Ramı́rez, Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, and 2 more authors

In Companion Publication of the 2020 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Virtual Event, USA, Jul 2020

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Outstanding poster award at CSCW 2020

Factors such as instructions, payment schemes, platform demographics, along with strategies for mapping studies into crowdsourcing environments, play an important role in the reproducibility of results. However, inferring these details from scientific articles is often a challenging endeavor, calling for the development of proper reporting guidelines. This paper makes the first steps towards this goal, by describing an initial taxonomy of relevant attributes for crowdsourcing experiments, and providing a glimpse into the state of reporting by analyzing a sample of CSCW papers.
Challenges and strategies for running controlled crowdsourcing experiments

Jorge Ramı́rez, Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, and 2 more authors

In 2020 XLVI Latin American Computing Conference (CLEI), Oct 2020

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This paper reports on the challenges and lessons we learned while running controlled experiments in crowdsourcing platforms. Crowdsourcing is becoming an attractive technique to engage a diverse and large pool of subjects in experimental research, allowing researchers to achieve levels of scale and completion times that would otherwise not be feasible in lab settings. However, the scale and flexibility comes at the cost of multiple and sometimes unknown sources of bias and confounding factors that arise from technical limitations of crowdsourcing platforms and from the challenges of running controlled experiments in the “wild”. In this paper, we take our experience in running systematic evaluations of task design as a motivating example to explore, describe, and quantify the potential impact of running uncontrolled crowdsourcing experiments and derive possible coping strategies. Among the challenges identified, we can mention sampling bias, controlling the assignment of subjects to experimental conditions, learning effects, and reliability of crowdsourcing results. According to our empirical studies, the impact of potential biases and confounding factors can amount to a 38% loss in the utility of the data collected in uncontrolled settings; and it can significantly change the outcome of experiments. These issues ultimately inspired us to implement CrowdHub, a system that sits on top of major crowdsourcing platforms and allows researchers and practitioners to run controlled crowdsourcing projects.
Bringing Cognitive Augmentation to Web Browsing Accessibility

Alessandro Pina, Marcos Baez, and Florian Daniel

In Service-Oriented Computing – ICSOC 2020 Workshops, Oct 2020

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In this paper we explore the opportunities brought by cognitive augmentation to provide a more natural and accessible web browsing experience. We explore these opportunities through conversational web browsing, an emerging interaction paradigm for the Web that enables blind and visually impaired users (BVIP), as well as regular users, to access the contents and features of websites through conversational agents. Informed by the literature, our previous work and prototyping exercises, we derive a conceptual framework for supporting BVIP conversational web browsing needs, to then focus on the challenges of automatically providing this support, describing our early work and prototype that leverage heuristics that consider structural and content features only.

2019

Technologies for promoting social participation in later life

Marcos Baez, Radoslaw Nielek, Fabio Casati, and 1 more author

Oct 2019

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Social participation is known to bring great benefits to the health and well-being of people as they age. From being in contact with others to engaging in group activities, keeping socially active can help slow down the effects of age-related declines and reduce risks of loneliness and social isolation and even mortality in old age. There are unfortunately a variety of barriers that make it difficult for older adults to engage in social activities on a regular basis. In this chapter, we give an overview of the challenges to social participation and discuss how technology can help overcome these barriers and promote participation in social activities. We examine two particular research threads and designs, exploring ways in which technology can support colocated and virtual participation: (i) an application that motivates the virtual participation in group training programs and (ii) a location-based game that supports colocated intergenerational ICT training classes. We discuss the effectiveness and limitations of various design choices in the two use cases and outline the lessons learned.
Understanding the impact of text highlighting in crowdsourcing tasks

Jorge Ramı́rez, Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the AAAI conference on human computation and crowdsourcing, Oct 2019

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Text classification is one of the most common goals of machine learning (ML) projects, and also one of the most frequent human intelligence tasks in crowdsourcing platforms. ML has mixed success in such tasks depending on the nature of the problem, while crowd-based classification has proven to be surprisingly effective, but can be expensive. Recently, hybrid text classification algorithms, combining human computation and machine learning, have been proposed to improve accuracy and reduce costs. One way to do so is to have ML highlight or emphasize portions of text that it believes to be more relevant to the decision. Humans can then rely only on this text or read the entire text if the highlighted information is insufficient. In this paper, we investigate if and under what conditions highlighting selected parts of the text can (or cannot) improve classification cost and/or accuracy, and in general how it affects the process and outcome of the human intelligence tasks. We study this through a series of crowdsourcing experiments running over different datasets and with task designs imposing different cognitive demands. Our findings suggest that highlighting is effective in reducing classification effort but does not improve accuracy - and in fact, low-quality highlighting can decrease it.
CrowdHub: Extending crowdsourcing platforms for the controlled evaluation of tasks designs

Jorge Ramı́rez, Simone Degiacomi, Davide Zanella, and 3 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.02800, Oct 2019

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We present CrowdHub, a tool for running systematic evalua- tions of task designs on top of crowdsourcing platforms. The goal is to support the evaluation process, avoiding potential experimental biases that, according to our empirical studies, can amount to 38% loss in the utility of the collected dataset in uncontrolled settings. Using CrowdHub, researchers can map their experimental design and automate the complex process of managing task execution over time while controlling for returning workers and crowd demographics, thus reducing bias, increasing utility of collected data, and making more efficient use of a limited pool of subjects
A systematic literature review of research-derived touchscreen design guidelines for older adults

Leysan Nurgalieva, Juan José Jara Laconich, Marcos Baez, and 2 more authors

IEEE Access, Oct 2019

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The distinct abilities of older adults to interact with touchscreen devices have motivated a wide range of contributions in the form of design guidelines, which aim at informing the design for the aging population. However, despite the growing effort by the research community, many challenges still remain in translating these research findings into actionable design guidelines, with reports hinting scant adoption or implementation issues, which ultimately hurt the development of more accessible interactive systems. In this systematic literature review, we look at the research-derived design guidelines that set the foundation for design guideline compilations and standards, analyzing the aforementioned issues from the perspective of experts trying to discover, classify, and evaluate the work on the area of touchscreen design guidelines for older adults. The review analyses 52 research articles resulting in 434 research-derived design guidelines for touchscreen applications. These guidelines are analyzed using a taxonomy that considered the older adults ability evolution and the design aspects that are the target of the recommendations. The results point to the use of different definition of older adults, which go as early as 55+, with the design of displays and interaction styles to accommodate to vision and dexterity declines as the most prominent areas of research. However, proposed guidelines and recommendations were validated in only 15% of articles analyzed. The analysis also revealed that identifying guidelines and characterizing their focus in terms of ability declines and design aspects addressed is a demanding activity and prone to error, given the quality of reporting and details offered in research articles.
Conversational Web Interaction: Proposal of a Dialog-Based Natural Language Interaction Paradigm for the Web

Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel, and Fabio Casati

In Chatbot Research and Design: Third International Workshop, CONVERSATIONS 2019, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 19–20, 2019, Revised Selected Papers, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Oct 2019

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This paper lays the foundation for a new delivery paradigm for web-accessible content and functionality, i.e., conversational interaction. Instead of asking users to read text, click through links and type on the keyboard, the vision is to enable users to “speak to a website” and to obtain natural language, spoken feedback. The paper describes how state-of-the-art chatbot technology can enable a dialog between the user and the website, proposes a reference architecture for the automated inference of site-specific chatbots able to mediate between the user and the website, and discusses open challenges and research questions. The envisioned, bidirectional dialog paradigm advances current screen reader technology and aims to benefit both regular users in eyes-free usage scenarios as well as visually impaired users in everyday scenarios.
Reliability of crowdsourcing as a method for collecting emotions labels on pictures

Olga Korovina, Marcos Baez, and Fabio Casati

BMC research notes, Oct 2019

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In this paper we study if and under what conditions crowdsourcing can be used as a reliable method for collecting high-quality emotion labels on pictures. To this end, we run a set of crowdsourcing experiments on the widely used IAPS dataset, using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) emotion collection instrument, in order to rate pictures on valence, arousal and dominance, and explore the consistency of crowdsourced results across multiple runs (reliability) and the level of agreement with the gold labels (quality). In doing so, we explored the impact of targeting populations of different level of reputation (and cost) and collecting varying numbers of ratings per picture.
Crowdsourced dataset to study the generation and impact of text highlighting in classification tasks

Jorge Ramı́rez, Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, and 1 more author

BMC Research Notes, Oct 2019

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Text classification is a recurrent goal in machine learning projects and a typical task in crowdsourcing platforms. Hybrid approaches, leveraging crowdsourcing and machine learning, work better than either in isolation and help to reduce crowdsourcing costs. One way to mix crowd and machine efforts is to have algorithms highlight passages from texts and feed these to the crowd for classification. In this paper, we present a dataset to study text highlighting generation and its impact on document classification.
Designing Interactive Systems to Mediate Communication Between Formal and Informal Caregivers in Aged Care

Leysan Nurgalieva, Marcos Baez, Greta Adamo, and 2 more authors

IEEE Access, 2019

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Previous work has focused on designing and evaluating information communication technology (ICT) tools for improving the coordination, organization of care practices, and to a less extent, the mediation of care communication among various involved actors. Our work contributes to addressing this gap with a specific emphasis on aged care, exploring communication practices, related challenges and design principles that should guide the design of technology-mediated information sharing. We do this by conducting three sets of user studies iterating on design mockups of increasing fidelity, through semi-structured interviews and workshops with nursing home (NH) staff and residents’ family members in four Italian nursing homes. The qualitative and quantitative results point to the potential of computer-mediated information sharing in this context, and to the importance (and challenges) of tailoring information and presentation to people’s needs and traits, and assisting care professionals in managing the information flow and proper communication.
@article{nurgalieva2019designing, author = {Nurgalieva, Leysan and Baez, Marcos and Adamo, Greta and Casati, Fabio and Marchese, Maurizio}, journal = {IEEE Access}, title = {Designing Interactive Systems to Mediate Communication Between Formal and Informal Caregivers in Aged Care}, year = {2019}, volume = {7}, number = {}, pages = {171173-171194}, keywords = {Aging;Information exchange;Tools;Information management;Medical services;Information and communication technology;Visualization;E-health;aged care;sharing;information architectures;information design;human computer interaction}, doi = {10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2954327}, issn = {2169-3536}, month = {}, }

2018

Agile development for vulnerable populations: lessons learned and recommendations

Marcos Baez, and Fabio Casati

In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2018

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In this paper we draw attention to the challenges of managing software projects for vulnerable populations, i.e., people potentially exposed to harm or not capable of protecting their own interests. The focus on human aspects, and particularly, the inclusion of human-centered approaches, has been a popular topic in the software engineering community. We argue, however, that current literature provides little understanding and guidance on how to approach these type of scenarios. Here, we shed some light on the topic by reporting on our experiences in developing innovative solutions for the residential care scenario, outlining potential issues and recommendations.
Feasibility of Virtual Tablet-Based Group Exercise Among Older Adults in Siberia: Findings From Two Pilot Trials

Svetlana Nikitina, Daniele Didino, Marcos Baez, and 1 more author

JMIR Mhealth Uhealth, Feb 2018

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Background: Regular physical activity has a positive effect on physical health, well-being, and life satisfaction of older adults. However, engaging in regular physical activity can be challenging for the elderly population because of reduced mobility, low motivation, or lack of the proper infrastructures in their communities. Objective: The objective of this paper was to study the feasibility of home-based online group training—under different group cohesion settings—and its effects on adherence and well-being among Russian older adults. We focused particularly on the technology usability and usage and on the adherence to the training (in light of premeasures of social support, enjoyment of physical activity, and leg muscle strength). As a secondary objective, we also explored the effects of the technology-supported intervention on subjective well-being and loneliness. Methods: Two pilot trials were carried out exploring two different group cohesion settings (weak cohesion and strong cohesion) in the period from 2015 to 2016 in Tomsk, Russian Federation. A total of 44 older adults (59-83 years) participated in the two pilots and followed a strength and balance training program (Otago) for 8 weeks with the help of a tablet-based virtual gym app. Participants in each pilot were assigned to an interaction condition, representing the online group exercising, and an individual condition, representing a home-based individual training. Both conditions featured persuasion strategies but differed in the ability to socialize and train together. Results: Both interaction and individual groups reported a high usability of the technology. Trainees showed a high level of technology acceptance and, particularly, a high score in intention to future use (4.2-5.0 on a 5-point Likert scale). Private texting (short service message [SMS]) was used more than public texting, and the strong cohesion condition resulted in more messages per user. Joint participations to training sessions (copresence) were higher for the social group with higher cohesion. The overall adherence to the training was 74% (SD 27%). Higher levels of social support at baseline were associated with higher adherence in the low cohesion condition (F1,18=5.23, P=.03), whereas in the high cohesion, such association was not found. Overall improvement in the satisfaction with life score was observed between pre and post measures (F1,31=5.85, P=.02), but no decrease in loneliness. Conclusions: Online group exercising was proven feasible among healthy independently living older adults in Russia. The pilots suggest that a physical training performed in a virtual environment positively affect the life satisfaction of the trainees, but it does not provide support for a decrease in loneliness. High cohesion groups are preferable for group exercising, especially to mitigate effects of low social support on adherence. Further research in motivating group interactions in training settings is needed.
Smart conversational agents for reminiscence

Svetlana Nikitina, Sara Callaioli, and Marcos Baez

In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering for Cognitive Services, Gothenburg, Sweden, Feb 2018

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In this paper we describe the requirements and early system design for a smart conversational agent that can assist older adults in the reminiscence process. The practice of reminiscence has well documented benefits for the mental, social and emotional well-being of older adults. However, the technology support, valuable in many different ways, is still limited in terms of need of co-located human presence, data collection capabilities, and ability to support sustained engagement, thus missing key opportunities to improve care practices, facilitate social interactions, and bring the reminiscence practice closer to those with less opportunities to engage in co-located sessions with a (trained) companion. We discuss conversational agents and cognitive services as the platform for building the next generation of reminiscence applications, and introduce the concept application of a smart reminiscence agent.
Investigating Crowdsourcing as a Method to Collect Emotion Labels for Images

Olga Korovina, Fabio Casati, Radoslaw Nielek, and 2 more authors

In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montreal QC, Canada, Feb 2018

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Labeling images is essential towards enabling the search and organization of digital media. This is true for both "factual", objective tags such as time, place and people, as well as for subjective labels, such as the emotion a picture generates. Indeed, the ability to associate emotions to images is one of the key functionality most image analysis services today strive to provide. In this paper we study how emotion labels for images can be crowdsourced and uncover limitations of the approach commonly used to gather training data today, that of harvesting images and tags from social media.
CrowdRev: A platform for Crowd-based Screening of Literature Reviews

Jorge Ramirez, Evgeny Krivosheev, Marcos Baez, and 3 more authors

Feb 2018

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In this paper and demo we present a crowd and crowd+AI based system, called CrowdRev, supporting the screening phase of literature reviews and achieving the same quality as author classification at a fraction of the cost, and near-instantly. CrowdRev makes it easy for authors to leverage the crowd, and ensures that no money is wasted even in the face of difficult papers or criteria: if the system detects that the task is too hard for the crowd, it just gives up trying (for that paper, or for that criteria, or altogether), without wasting money and never compromising on quality.
Designing for Co-located and Virtual Social Interactions in Residential Care

Francisco Ibarra, Marcos Baez, Francesca Fiore, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems, Hong Kong, China, Feb 2018

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In this paper we explore the feasibility and design challenges in supporting co-located and virtual social interactions in residential care by building on the practice of reminiscence. Motivated by the challenges of social interaction in this context, we first explore the feasibility of a reminiscence-based social interaction tool designed to stimulate conversation in residential care with different stakeholders. Then, we explore the design challenges in supporting an assisting role in co-located reminiscence sessions, by running pilot studies with a technology probe. Our findings point to the feasibility of the tool and the willingness of stakeholders to contribute in the process, although with some skepticism about virtual interactions. The reminiscence sessions showed that compromises are needed when designing for both story collection and conversation stimulation, evidencing specific design areas where further exploration is needed.
Design Challenges for Reconnecting in Later Life: A Qualitative Study

Francisco Ibarra, Grzegorz Kowalik, Marcos Baez, and 4 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems, Hong Kong, China, Feb 2018

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Friendships and social interactions are renown contributors to wellbeing. As such, keeping a healthy amount of relationships becomes very important as people age and the size of their social network tends to decrease. In this paper, we take a step back and explore reconnection –find out about or re-contact old friends, an emerging topic due to the increased use of computer-mediated technology by older adults to maintain friendships and form new ones. We report on our findings from semi-structured interviews with 28 individuals from Costa Rica and Poland. The interviews aimed to explore whether there is a wish to reconnect, and the challenges encountered by older adults to reconnect. We contribute with design considerations for tools allowing older adults to reconnect, discussing opportunities for technology.
Combining Crowd and Machines for Multi-predicate Item Screening

Evgeny Krivosheev, Fabio Casati, Marcos Baez, and 1 more author

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Nov 2018

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This paper discusses how crowd and machine classifiers can be efficiently combined to screen items that satisfy a set of predicates. We show that this is a recurring problem in many domains, present machine-human (hybrid) algorithms that screen items efficiently and estimate the gain over human-only or machine-only screening in terms of performance and cost. We further show how, given a new classification problem and a set of classifiers of unknown accuracy for the problem at hand, we can identify how to manage the cost-accuracy trade off by progressively determining if we should spend budget to obtain test data (to assess the accuracy of the given classifiers), or to train an ensemble of classifiers, or whether we should leverage the existing machine classifiers with the crowd, and in this case how to efficiently combine them based on their estimated characteristics to obtain the classification. We demonstrate that the techniques we propose obtain significant cost/accuracy improvements with respect to the leading classification algorithms.
Crowdsourcing for reminiscence chatbot design

Svetlana Nikitina, Florian Daniel, Marcos Baez, and 1 more author

In HCOMP 2018 Works in Progress and Demonstration Papers, Nov 2018

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In this work-in-progress paper we discuss the challenges in identifying effective and scalable crowd-based strategies for designing content, conversation logic, and meaningful metrics for a reminiscence chatbot targeted at older adults. We formalize the problem and outline the main research questions that drive the research agenda in chatbot design for reminiscence and for relational agents for older adults in general.
Designing Healthcare Systems with an Emphasis on Relational Quality and Peace of Mind

Leysan Nurgalieva, Marcos Baez, Francesca Fiore, and 2 more authors

In Social Informatics, Nov 2018

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In this paper we explore the challenges and opportunities of designing information systems in healthcare with an emphasis on informational needs of family caregivers and work practices of professionals. We focus particularly on the context of Nursing Homes (NH), where family members and care professionals are often faced with challenging situations that can affect their ability to communicate and collaborate effectively, and thus, leading to the episodes of conflicts or mismatch of expectations. We report on two sets of user studies with staff and residents’ family members in four nursing homes, studying current information practices, factors that influence them, and explore design alternatives that could target identified issues.

2017

Effects of online group exercises for older adults on physical, psychological and social wellbeing: a randomized pilot trial

Marcos Baez, Iman Khaghani Far, Francisco Ibarra, and 3 more authors

PeerJ, Nov 2017

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Background. Intervention programs to promote physical activity in older adults, either in group or home settings, have shown equivalent health outcomes but different results when considering adherence. Group-based interventions seem to achieve higher participation in the long-term. However, there are many factors that can make of group exercises a challenging setting for older adults. A major one, due to the heterogeneity of this particular population, is the difference in the level of skills. In this paper we report on the physical, psychological and social wellbeing outcomes of a technology-based intervention that enable online group exercises in older adults with different levels of skills. Methods. A total of 37 older adults between 65 and 87 years old followed a personalized exercise program based on the OTAGO program for fall prevention, for a period of eight weeks. Participants could join online group exercises using a tablet-based application. Participants were assigned either to the Control group, representing the traditional individual home-based training program, or the Social group, representing the online group exercising. Pre- and post- measurements were taken to analyze the physical, psychological and social wellbeing outcomes. Results. After the eight-weeks training program there were improvements in both the Social and Control groups in terms of physical outcomes, given the high level of adherence of both groups. Considering the baseline measures, however, the results suggest that while in the Control group fitter individuals tended to adhere more to the training, this was not the case for the Social group, where the initial level had no effect on adherence. For psychological outcomes there were improvements on both groups, regardless of the application used. There was no significant difference between groups in social wellbeing outcomes, both groups seeing a decrease in loneliness despite the presence of social features in the Social group. However, online social interactions have shown to be correlated to the decrease in loneliness in the Social group. Conclusion. The results indicate that technology-supported online group-exercising which conceals individual differences in physical skills is effective in motivating and enabling individuals who are less fit to train as much as fitter individuals. This not only indicates the feasibility of training together despite differences in physical skills but also suggests that online exercise might reduce the effect of skills on adherence in a social context. However, results from this pilot are limited to a small sample size and therefore are not conclusive. Longer term interventions with more participants are instead recommended to assess impacts on wellbeing and behavior change.
Understanding How Software Can Support the Needs of Family Caregivers for Patients with Severe Conditions

Angela Fiore, Francesco Ceschel, Francesca Fiore, and 3 more authors

In 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society Track (ICSE-SEIS), May 2017

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In this paper, we report an extensive analysis that we performed in two scenarios where the care relation between doctor and patients are mediated by the relatives of the patients: Pediatric Palliative Care (PPC) and Nursing Homes (NH). When the patients are children or very old adults in the end of life, the provision of care often involve a family caregiver as the main point of contact for the health service. PPC and NH are characterized by emotional complexity, since incurable diseases expose the family caregivers to heavy careload and human distress. In this paper, we discuss our findings with a novel perspective, focusing on: information, coordination and social challenges that arise by dealing with such contexts, the existing technology as it is appropriated today to cope with them, and what we, as software researchers, can do to develop the right solutions.
A Home-Based Exercise Program Driven by Tablet Application and Mobility Monitoring for Frail Older Adults: Feasibility and Practical Implications

Hilde AE Geraedts, Wiebren Zijlstra, Wei Zhang, and 5 more authors

Preventing Chronic Disease, May 2017

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Introduction. Stimulation of a physically active lifestyle among older adults is essential to health and well-being. The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and user opinion of a home-based exercise program supported by a sensor and tablet application for frail older adults. Methods. Community-dwelling older adults (aged ≥70 y) living in The Netherlands were recruited in 2014. Participants exercised 3 months with and 3 months without supervision from a remote coach. Feasibility was operationalized as adherence to exercise (percentage of 5 exercise bouts per week completed) and to wearing the sensor (with 70% defined as sufficient adherence) and the number of problems reported. User opinion was measured with a questionnaire addressing ease of use of the technology and opinion on the program. Results. Twenty-one of 40 enrolled participants completed the trial. Adherence overall was 60.9% (average of 3 bouts per week). Adherence among completers (69.2%) was significantly higher than adherence among dropouts (49.9%). Adherence was sufficient among completers during the 3 months of supervision (75.8%). Adherence to wearing the sensor was 66.7% and was significantly higher among completers than among dropouts (75.7% vs 54.2%). The rate of incidents was significantly lower among completers than among dropouts (0.4 vs 1.2 incidents per participant per week). Connectivity-related incidents were prominent. On a scale of 1 to 5, completers gave ratings of 4.3 (after 3 months) and 4.2 (after 6 months). Conclusion. A home-based exercise program using novel technology seems feasible when participants are given a stable internet connection. This program shows promise for stimulating physical activity among older frail adults, especially if it offers regular coaching.
Designing for older adults: review of touchscreen design guidelines

Leysan Nurgalieva, Juan Jose Jara Laconich, Marcos Baez, and 2 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.06317, May 2017

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The distinct abilities of older adults to interact with comput- ers has motivated a wide range of contributions in the the form of design guidelines for making technologies usable and accessible for the elderly population. However, despite the growing effort by the research community, the adoption of guidelines by developers and designers has been scant or not properly translated into more accessible interaction systems. In this paper we explore this issue by reporting on a qual- itative outcomes of a systematic review of 204 research- derived design guidelines for touchscreen applications. We report first on the different definitions of “elderly" and assess the reliability, organization and accessibility of the guidelines. Then we present our early attempt at facilitating the reporting and access of such guidelines to researchers and practitioners.
Viability of Magazines for Stimulating Social Interactions in Nursing Homes

Valentina Caforio, Marcos Baez, and Fabio Casati

In Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2017, May 2017

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Social isolation and loneliness have a strong negative impact on health and happiness. The correlation is present at all ages, but the risk of loneliness and isolation is particularly high in later life and when transitioning to residential care settings, where keeping in touch with the family, making new friends and integrating with the community in a new social context can be very challenging. In this note we report on our preliminary studies on the opportunity and feasibility of using custom, printed magazines for increasing feelings of connectedness and promoting meaningful interactions in nursing homes. The content and layout for the magazine are generated in an automatic or semi-automatic way and emphasize aspects that could lead to discovering connections or starting conversations. Initial findings point to the potential for such a magazine and lead to content guidelines that we elaborate in the paper.
Stimulating Conversations in Residential Care Through Technology-Mediated Reminiscence

Francisco Ibarra, Marcos Baez, Francesca Fiore, and 1 more author

In Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2017, May 2017

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In this paper we describe the design of a reminiscence-based social interaction tool, namely Collegamenti, that aims at stimulating conversations and a sense of mutual awareness in residential care. Unlike previous work, Collegamenti focuses on stimulating the different types of relationships that are relevant to the quality of life in residential care: interactions with primary family caregivers, contacts with the larger family, friendships with peer residents and interactions with the nursing home staff. We explore the needs and challenges of this scenario in terms of social interactions but also in terms of how to make the technology sustainable and well integrated with care practices and initiatives, and report on the findings from the qualitative studies and concept validation.
Online group exercises for older adults: Randomized controlled trials to study adherence and effects

F Casati, M Baez, and S Nikitina

Innovation in Aging, May 2017

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Intervention programs to promote physical activity in older adults, either in group or home settings, have shown equivalent health outcomes but different results when considering adherence. Group-based interventions seem to achieve higher participation in the long-term. However, there are many factors that can make of group exercises a challenging setting for older adults. A major one, due to the heterogeneity of this particular population, is the difference in the level of skills. In this paper we report on the physical, psychological and social wellbeing as well as on the adherence outcomes of a technology-based intervention that enable online group exercises in older adults with different levels of skills. A total of 122 older adults over 65 followed a personalized exercise program based on the OTAGO program for fall prevention, for a period of eight weeks. Participants could join online group exercises using a tablet-based application. Participants were assigned to study groups corresponding to technologies enabling different degrees of virtual group exercising and social interactions, and equipped with sensors detecting physical activity. Pre- and post- measurements were taken to analyze adherence, behavior change, and the physical, psychological and social wellbeing outcomes. After the training program there were improvements in all groups in terms of physical outcomes, but the group with technology for virtual group exercising showed a significant and large positive difference in terms of adherence to the training program. In addition, this group showed a higher use of the process of behavior change, suggesting an effect of the persuasion strategies.

2016

REST APIs: A Large-Scale Analysis of Compliance with Principles and Best Practices

Carlos Rodriguez, Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel, and 4 more authors

In 16th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2016), May 2016

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Quickly and dominantly, REST APIs have spread over the Web and percolated into modern software development practice, especially in the Mobile Internet where they conveniently enable offloading data and computations onto cloud services. We analyze more than 78 GB of HTTP traffic collected by Italy’s biggest Mobile Internet provider over one full day and study how big the trend is in practice, how it changed the traffic that is generated by applications, and how REST APIs are implemented in practice. The analysis provides insight into the compliance of state-of-the-art APIs with theoretical Web engineering principles and guidelines, knowledge that affects how applications should be developed to be scalable and robust. The perspective is that of the Mobile Internet.
Online group-exercises for older adults of different physical abilities

Marcos Baez, Francisco Ibarra, Iman Khaghani Far, and 2 more authors

In 2016 international conference on collaboration technologies and systems (CTS), Oct 2016

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In this paper we describe the design and validation of a virtual fitness environment aiming at keeping older adults physically and socially active. We target particularly older adults who are socially more isolated, physically less active, and with less chances of training in a gym. The virtual fitness environment, namely Gymcentral, was designed to enable and motivate older adults to follow personalised exercises from home, with a (heterogeneous) group of remote friends and under the remote supervision of a Coach. We take the training activity as an opportunity to create social interactions, by complementing training features with social instruments. Finally, we report on the feasibility and effectiveness of the virtual environment, as well as its effects on the usage and social interactions, from an intervention study in Trento, Italy.
What Makes People Bond?: A Study on Social Interactions and Common Life Points on Facebook

Emanuel Sanchiz, Francisco Ibarra, Svetlana Nikitina, and 2 more authors

In 2016 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), Oct 2016

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In this paper we aim at understanding if and how, by analysing people’s profile and historical data (such as data available on Facebook profiles and interactions, or collected explicitly) we can motivate two persons to interact and eventually create long-term bonds. We do this by exploring the relationship between connectedness, social interactions and common life points on Facebook. The results are of particular importance for the development of technology that aims at reducing social isolation for people with less chances to interact, such as older adults.
Fitness Applications for Home-Based Training

Iman Khaghani-Far, Svetlana Nikitina, Marcos Baez, and 2 more authors

IEEE Pervasive Computing, Oct 2016

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Recent technological advances have created enormous opportunities for developing applications that support training from home - particularly for older adults, who often are socially more isolated, are physically less active, and have fewer chances to train in a gym. In this article, the authors review current fitness applications and their features alongside the design challenges and opportunities of fitness applications for trainees at home.
Idea Management Communities in the Wild: An Exploratory Study of 166 Online Communities

Jorge Saldivar, Marcos Baez, Carlos Rodriguez, and 2 more authors

In 2016 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), Oct 2016

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Idea Management (IM) communities have the potential to transform business and communities through innovation. However, building successful communities is a difficult endeavor that requires a significant amount of both community management and technological support. Doing this requires a good understanding of how IM systems are used and how users behave, as these are fundamental aspects for the design of effective technological support as well as devising community management strategies. In this paper, we study 166 IM communities in the “wild” — communities openly available on Ideascale, one of today’s leading IM software platforms — to better understand how they are used in practice, and by whom. We do this via i) a qualitative analysis of community properties to identify community archetypes; ii) a quantitative analysis of user activity logs to identify patterns of collective and individual user behavior.
Tools Enabling Online Contributions by Older Adults

Francisco Ibarra, Olga Korovina, Marcos Baez, and 4 more authors

IEEE Internet Computing, Sep 2016

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Having a sense of purpose is one of the tenets of well-being, at any age. Here, the authors review technologies that could help older adults remain active in society – in particular, those who can’t leave their home regularly or easily. The authors also discuss areas that current research and practice haven’t yet addressed satisfactorily.
Personalized persuasion for social interactions in nursing homes

Marcos Baez, Chiara Dalpiaz, Fatbardha Hoxha, and 3 more authors

Sep 2016

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This paper presents our preliminary investigation and approach towards a mixed physical-virtual technology for stimulating social interactions among and with older adults in nursing homes. We report on set of surveys, apps and focus groups aiming at understanding the different motivations and obstacles in promoting social interactions in institutionalised care. We then present our approach to address some of the key themes found, e.g., the technological disparity, lack of conversation topics and opportunities to interact.

2015

The interplay of physical and social wellbeing in older adults: investigating the relationship between physical training and social interactions with virtual social environments

Iman Khaghani Far, Michela Ferron, Francisco Ibarra, and 4 more authors

PeerJ Computer Science, Sep 2015

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Background. Regular physical activity can substantially improve the physical wellbeing of older adults, preventing several chronic diseases and increasing cognitive performance and mood. However, research has shown that older adults are the most sedentary segment of society, spending much of their time seated or inactive. A variety of barriers make it difficult for older adults to maintain an active lifestyle, including logistical difficulties in going to a gym (for some adults, leaving home can be challenging), reduced functional abilities, and lack of motivation. In this paper, we report on the design and evaluation of Gymcentral. A training application running on tablet was designed to allow older adults to follow a personalized home-based exercise program while being remotely assisted by a coach. The objective of the study was to assess if a virtual gym that enables virtual presence and social interaction is more motivating for training than the same virtual gym without social interaction. Methods. A total of 37 adults aged between 65 and 87 years old (28 females and 9 males, mean age = 71, sd = 5.8) followed a personalized home-based strength and balance training plan for eight weeks. The participants performed the exercises autonomously at home using the Gymcentral application. Participants were assigned to two training groups: the Social group used an application with persuasive and social functionalities, while the Control group used a basic version of the service with no persuasive and social features. We further explored the effects of social facilitation, and in particular of virtual social presence, in user participation to training sessions. Outcome measures were adherence, persistence and co-presence rate. Results. Participants in the Social group attended significantly more exercise sessions than the Control group, providing evidence of a better engagement in the training program. Besides the focus on social persuasion measures, the study also confirms that a virtual gym service is effective for supporting individually tailored home-based physical training for older adults. The study also confirms that social facilitation tools motivate users to train together in a virtual fitness environment. Discussion. The study confirms that Gymcentral increases the participation of older adults in physical training compare to a similar version of the application without social and persuasive features. In addition, a significant increase in the co-presence of the Social group indicates that social presence motivates the participants to join training sessions at the same time with the other participants. These results are encouraging, as they motivate further research into using home-based training programs as an opportunity to stay physically and socially active, especially for those who for various reasons are bound to stay at home.
Virtual, remote participation in museum visits by older adults: a feasibility study

Galena Kostoska, Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel, and 1 more author

In 8th International Workshop on Personalized Access to Cultural Heritage (PATCH 2015), ACM IUI 2015, Sep 2015

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The goal of this paper is to understand if older adults can participate in remote museum visits with virtual environments, and which design factors would be crucial for remote participation system success. We report on a study with 30 older adult participants, identifying strong and weak points of different designs for remote participation and identifying future design directions. Our results illustrate that different designs can change communication dynamics, exploration and navi- gation patterns, and we describe the design features that led to this. An interaction-free design was found to be the easiest to use, while virtual environments are perceived as aesthetically appealing. Implications for developers are discussed.

2014

Virtual Social Gym: a Persuasive Training Platform for Independently Living Seniors

Iman Khaghani Far, Francisco Ibarra, Marcos Baez, and 1 more author

In 9th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2014, Sep 2014

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In this paper we introduce a system, namely Virtual Social Gym (VSG), that aims at increasing the physical and social well being of elderly people. It does so based by i) allowing elderly people at different level of capabilities to train independently from home, while still getting the feeling of training within a fitness class with the other training members, ii) exploiting social interactions and the feeling of being part of a community (a gym) as a motivational factor for performing regular training.

2013

Collecting memories of the museum experience

Galena Kostoska, Denise Fezzi, Beatrice Valeri, and 4 more authors

In CHI’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paris, France, Sep 2013

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When we go to the museum, we see many interesting objects that have fascinating stories related to them. However, visitors do not often share these experiences with people that have not visited the exhibition. Sharing is beneficial both because it can create interest and attract people to the museum, and because it can help people who cannot attend the visit (for example, is physically unable to do so) to still enjoy it. We were interested to understand the extent and motivation behind sharing (or not sharing) and test how to encourage visitors to do so. We conducted and are conducting various surveys and trials, for which we report the preliminary results in this paper. Initial findings show that i) people today rarely share their visits for lack of content to complement their storytelling, and ii) by providing visitors with a simple and easy-to-create virtual photobook with their dearest memories from the visit we can significantly enhance this sharing.
🏆 Come Along: understanding and motivating participation to social leisure activities

Beatrice Valeri, Marcos Baez, and Fabio Casati

In 2013 International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing, Sep 2013

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Best paper award at Social Computing and its Applications (SCA 2013)

In this paper we study the factors that affect people’s decision in participating in leisure activities in the social and cultural environment. To this end, we collected the ratings of local people from three different cities around the world on standard leisure activities, and looked at the personal, social and contextual features shaping their preferences. We then used this dataset to evaluate how these features can be exploited to recommend places people would actually like. Our initial results suggest that friends are a good source for recommending places, with higher precision and recall than considering only popular places, but these can be improved reducing the scope to similar friends in the context of the particular activity. We have also found that people preferences are sensitive to the companion (e.g., partner, friends, tourists) for which they look for different features. The results also suggest that similarities in the preferences of people can be extended to other activities, which points to the potential of profiling users based on lifestyle. We finally present the design and prototype of a system, namely Come Along, which aims at helping people discover, find and participate to social and leisure activities.
Sharing museum experiences: an approach adapted for older and cognitively impaired adults

Galena Kostoska, Fezzi Denise, Beatrice Valeri, and 2 more authors

In Museums and the Web ASIA 2013, Sep 2013

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The paper describes the design process and a preliminary study of a novel interface (digital booklet) for facilitating sharing of museums experiences and specifically for helping older adults to participate remotely to museum visits done by friends or relatives. We design in particular for people that for cognitive, physical, or logistic limitations are not able to visit museums, or for which it is very challenging to do so. We performed a user study with a total of 30 older adult participants, 21 in care home (10 of which with significant cognitive decline), and 9 participants in daily center (all of them without degenerative health problems). Our main hypothesis was that given the right set of tools for supporting the visitor during and after the visit we could increase sharing and reach wider audiences, including older and cognitively impaired adults. We compared the performance between healthy and cognitively impaired older adults on four tasks: open the booklet, browse the booklet, zoom in/out a picture, close the picture after being zoomed in/out. Our results showed that the booklet metaphor was well accepted by almost all the participants and they were able to consume and enjoy the content; the more complex and less intuitive functions like zooming and closing a picture were found to be more difficult for the the cognitively impaired group of participants. Our results can contribute the ongoing research in the field of interfaces for older adults and the challenge of intergenerational communication.
Understanding Sharing Habits in Museum Visits: A Pilot Study

Galena Kostoska, Denise Fezzi, Beatrice Valeri, and 4 more authors

Proc. MW2013, Sep 2013

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Most museums try to find with different ways to prolong the museum experience outside of the museum environment and facilitate its sharing after the visit. The main reason is two-fold: it can create interest and attract people to the museum, and it can help people who for various cognitive or physical limitations cannot attend the visit, to still enjoy it. We conducted couple of surveys and we designed a possible platform for facilitating sharing, for which we report the preliminary results in this paper. Our findings show that i) although visitors claim that they would like to share their visit, the number of the actual sharing visitors is significantly low, ii) most of the visitors use only verbal narrations in order to share their experience with friends and families, and iii) visitors do not share emotions “virtually” (e.g., facebook or twitter) during the visit. Guided by these results we developed a potential solution through which sharing can be facilitated. It includes various ways to bookmark or “save” and share artifacts during the visit, catering different types of visitors. It also includes a way for people at home to consume the shared content.
Idea spotter and comment interpreter: Sensemaking tools for idea management systems

Gregorio Convertino, A Sándor, and Marcos Baez

In ACM Communities and Technologies Workshop: Large-Scale Idea Management and Deliberation Systems Workshop, Sep 2013

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Regular contributors and facilitators using current idea management systems face the problem of information overload. With large numbers of ideas to be assessed or refined, they lack adequate support to efficiently make sense of unstructured idea descriptions and comments. We propose two sensemaking tools as enhancements of current idea management systems: the idea spotter and the comment interpreter. Both integrate interactive user interfaces that use the output of automatic linguistic analysis of ideas and comments. In this workshop paper we present the prototypes, their preliminary evaluation, and the next steps in this research.

2012

Innovation cockpit: a dashboard for facilitators in idea management

Marcos Baez, and Gregorio Convertino

In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion, Seattle, Washington, USA, Sep 2012

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We present the design of a dashboard for facilitators in Idea Management Systems (IMS), an emerging class of collaborative software for business organizations or local geographic communities. In these systems, users can generate, share, judge, refine, and select ideas as part of a grassroots process. However, a class of users that lacks adequate support in current IMS are the facilitators. Their role is to help the best ideas to emerge and grow, while balancing the judgments of the crowd with those of the managers or the community leaders. We show how the dashboard helps facilitators in making more efficient and effective decisions in situations where the selection and judgment become prohibitively lengthy and time consuming.
Designing a facilitator’s cockpit for an idea management system

Marcos Baez, and Gregorio Convertino

In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion, Seattle, Washington, USA, Sep 2012

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We present the design of a dashboard for facilitators in Idea Management Systems (IMS). IMS are an emerging class of collaborative software tools aimed at business organizations or local geographic communities. Through these systems users can generate, share, judge, refine, and select ideas as part of a grassroots process. However, a class of users that is lacking adequate support in current IMS are the facilitators. Their role is to help the best ideas to emerge and grow, while balancing the judgments of the crowd with those of the managers or the community leaders. In this paper we point to the unmet needs of these users, describe the design of a system prototype, and the evaluation of a first version of this prototype to test our design.
A model for knowledge elicitation, organization and distribution in the cultural entertainment sector

Beatrice Valeri, Fabio Casati, Marcos Baez, and 1 more author

In Human Centric Technology and Service in Smart Space: HumanCom 2012, Sep 2012

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In the past museums have been slow in fully utilising new technologies, but in the last decade this situation has changed dramatically. The need for more support to visitors and more collaboration between experts and between museums has led to the exploration of how new technologies can extend the traditional museum. In this paper a new concept of such an extended museum is presented, with particular attention to gathering, organization and consumption of knowledge.
Unifying platform for the physical, mental and social well-being of the elderly

Iman Khaghani Far, Patrı́cia Silveira, Fabio Casati, and 1 more author

In Embedded and Multimedia Computing Technology and Service: EMC 2012, Sep 2012

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Aging deteriorates cognitive and physical abilities. Besides this, social activities decline in older ages. However, it is possible to slow down the deterioration of these abilities and to prolong the time elders live independently at their homes by proper training plan exercises. Existing tools offer very limited support as their design does not take into account elders as target users and the motivational factors that following training plans poses on them. In this paper we present a unified platform that hosts training games and physical exercises and leverage them with social, motivational and monitoring instruments.
Knowledge Dissemination in the Web Era

Marcos Baez

Sep 2012

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In this research work, we address the limitations of the current scientific knowledge dissemination model to face the new scenario posed by the Web. We explore the historical reasons behind the current model, and we show that it is essentially the same today, even if the Web has made dissemination nearly real time and free. We show how this misalignment between the current model and Web capabilities brings not only missed opportunities but also a serious overload problem, creating difficulties for authors to gain visibility, and for readers to find interesting content. Our approach has been to build from the ground up, by i) understanding how the very core concepts of scientific publishing such as "scientific contribution," "scientific journal," and even "reputation" should adapt to the new scenario; ii) studying the dissemination and sharing practices that are inherently present in the scientific community, to understand how technology can empower those practices to reduce information overload. The outcome is novel models, tools, and a platform for knowledge dissemination that takes full advantage of the Web while addressing the overload problem.
Comealong: Empowering experience-sharing through social networks

Beatrice Valeri, Marcos Baez, and Fabio Casati

In 8th International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (CollaborateCom), Oct 2012

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In this paper we present a social platform that empowers real-life social experiences by using the crowd to help people discover interesting events around a particular location and make the best of the actual experience. We demonstrate how current systems cover only partially the social and individual motivations on deciding and teaming up for events, and propose i) a system of implicit and explicit incentives that rewards intention and experience sharing within circles based on friendship or interests and ii) a discovery algorithm that combines the importance of coming along with friends with the personal interests to recommend events. The resulting platform has been applied to generic events as well as domain-specific ones such as shows in movie theaters.

2011

Sharing scientific knowledge with knowledge spaces

Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, and Maurizio Marchese

In Social Informatics: Third International Conference, SocInfo 2011, Singapore, October 6-8, 2011. Proceedings 3, Oct 2011

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This paper presents a set of models and an extensible social web platform (namely, Knowledge Spaces) that supports novel and agile social scientific dissemination processes. Knowledge Spaces is based on a model for structured, evolving, and multi-facet scientific resources that allows the representation of structured, evolving, and multi-facet scientific knowledge and meta-knowledge, of effective “viral” algorithms for helping scientists find the knowledge they need, and of interaction metaphors that facilitate its usage.
Knowledge spaces

Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, and Maurizio Marchese

In Web Engineering: 11th International Conference, ICWE 2011, Paphos, Cyprus, June 20-24, 2011 11, Oct 2011

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This paper presents a set of models and an extensible social web platform (namely, Knowledge spaces) that supports novel and agile social scientific dissemination processes. Knowledge spaces is based on a model for scientific resources that allows the representation of scientific knowledge and meta-knowledge, of effective “viral” algorithms for helping scientists find the knowledge they need, and of interaction metaphors that facilitate its usage. The concept and a preliminary implementation of Knowledge spaces, in their various forms and designs, are being exploited in several different pilots.
Understanding and supporting search for scholarly knowledge

Marcos Baez, Daniil Mirylenka, and Cristhian Parra

Proceeding of the 7th European Computer Science Summit, Oct 2011

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In the last decade, scholarly communication have been greatly transformed by the web, moving research dissemination away from printed papers in journals to digital content that can be easily posted on the Internet. This technical factor along with a larger scientific community makes it really hard to find relevant content for research in the ever growing sea of publications. With the goal of gaining insights on how researchers find relevant knowledge, we have interviewed a small group of researchers and then opened an online survey to a larger group, asking them to explain how they had found references for one of their papers. The results of this study suggest that finding scientific knowledge has a strong social component, with the different researchers’ social networks (e.g., coauthors, people met at conferences) accounting for a important percentage of the source of the references. In this paper we report on this study and compare our results with the evidence found in a dataset of 5 x 106 authors with their publications and references. We take these results and analyze different approaches for incorporating the social component into search and recommendation of scientific publications.

2010

Liquid Journals: Knowledge Dissemination in the Web Era

Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, Aliaksandr Birukou, and 1 more author

Oct 2010

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In this paper we redefine the notion of “scientific journal” to update it to the age of the Web. We explore the historical reasons behind the current journal model, and we show that this model is essentially the same today, even if the Web has made dissemination essentially free. We propose a notion of liquid and personal journals that evolve continuously in time and that are targeted to serve individuals or communities of arbitrarily small or large scales. The liquid journals provide “interesting” content, in the form of “scientific contributions” that are “related” to a certain paper, topic, or area, and that are posted (on their web site, repositories, traditional jour- nals) by “inspiring” researchers. As such, the liquid journal separates the notion of “publishing” (which can be achieved by submitting to traditional peer review journals or just by posting content on the Web) from the appearance of con- tributions into the journals, which are essentially collections of content. In this paper we introduce the liquid journal model, and demonstrate through some examples its value to individuals and communities. Finally, we describe an architecture and a working prototype that implements the proposed model.
Addressing Information Overload in the Scientific Community

Marcos Baez, Aliaksandr Birukou, Fabio Casati, and 1 more author

IEEE Internet Computing, Nov 2010

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The authors present Liquid Journal, a dissemination model and website that extends from the notion of a traditional scientific journal to overcome the problem of information overload in the scientific community. They detail Liquid Journal’s concepts, methods, and supporting platform. They also focus on the issues related to having access to relevant scientific content, such as narrowing down the discovery process to reliable sources (venues and authors) when dealing with vast amounts of information.
A Scientific Resource Space Management System

Cristhian Parra, Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel, and 3 more authors

Nov 2010

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As the web continues to change the way we produce and disseminate scientific knowledge, traditional digital libraries are confronted with the challenge of transcending their boundaries to remain compatible with a world where the whole Web in itself is the source of scientific knowledge. This paper discusses a resource-oriented approach for the management and interaction of scientific services as a way to face this challenge. Our approach consists in building a general-purpose, extensible layer for accessing any resource that has an URI and is accessible on the Web, along with appropriate extensions specific to the scientific domain. We name the class of systems that have this functionality Scientific Resource Space Management Systems, since they are the resource analogous of data space management systems known in literature. In this paper, we describe the motivations, concepts, architecture, and implementation of the platform and one validating usage scenario.
Domain-specific mashups: from all to all you need

Stefano Soi, and Marcos Baez

In Current Trends in Web Engineering: 10th International Conference on Web Engineering ICWE 2010 Workshops, Vienna, Austria, July 2010, Revised Selected Papers 10, Nov 2010

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Last years, aside the proliferation of Web 2.0, we assisted to the drastic growth of the mashup market. An increasing number of different mashup solutions and platforms emerged, some focusing on data integration (a la Yahoo! Pipes), others on user interface (UI) integration and some trying to integrate both UI and data. Most of proposed solutions have a common characteristic: they aim at providing non-programmers with a flexible and intuitive general-purpose development environment. While these generic environments could be useful for web users to develop simple applications, they are often too generic to address domain-specific needs and to allow users to develop real-life complex applications. In particular, proposed mashup mechanisms do not reflect those specific concepts that are proper of a given domain, which domain-experts are familiar with and could autonomously manage. We argue the need for domain-specific mashup architectures, also going beyond today’s enterprise platforms, in which standard mashup mechanisms and components are driven by an underlying domain-specific layer. This layer will provide a service and component ecosystem built upon a shared and uniform conceptual model specific for the given domain. This way, domain experts will be provided with mashup components and mechanisms, following those well-known concepts and rules proper of the domain they belong to, that they are able to understand, use and, finally, profitably compose. In this paper, we will show the necessity of such an architecture through a real-life use case in the context of scientific publications and journals.
Liquid course artifacts software platform

Marcos Baez, Boualem Benatallah, Fabio Casati, and 3 more authors

In Service-Oriented Computing: 8th International Conference, ICSOC 2010, San Francisco, CA, USA, December 7-10, 2010. Proceedings 8, Nov 2010

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Liquid Course Artifacts Software Platform aims to improve social productivity and enhance interactive experience for teaching and collaborating by using suppliment materials such as slides, exercises, audios, videos and books.
Liquid journals: scientific journals in the Web 2.0 era

Marcos Baez, Alejandro Mussi, Fabio Casati, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, Nov 2010

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In this demo we introduce a platform and a model of journal in the age of the Web called liquid journal. The goal of the model (and of the supporting platform) is to disseminate knowledge in the best possible way while also supporting scientists in the credit attribution. In a nutshell, liquid journals are collections of "interesting" links to scientific contributions, such as papers, blogs, datasets, that are related to certain topics. The content gets to the journal either by querying both conventional and non conventional sources on the Web or manually by the group of editors. Liquid journals combines depth and breath in bringing a wider spectrum of scientific contributions from different communities, while also focusing editors’ and readers’ attention on the things they care about. The demo illustrates the features and benefits of the proposed platform.

2009

Universal resource lifecycle management

Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati, and Maurizio Marchese

In 2009 IEEE 25th International Conference on Data Engineering, Mar 2009

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This paper presents a model and a tool that allows Web users to define, execute, and manage lifecycles for any artifact available on the Web. In the paper we show the need for lifecycle management of Web artifacts, and we show in particular why it is important that non-programmers are also able to do this. We then discuss why current models do not allow this, and we present a model and a system implementation that achieves lifecycle management for any URI-identifiable and accessible object. The most challenging parts of the work lie in the definition of a simple but universal model and system (and in particular in allowing universality and simplicity to coexist) and in the ability to hide from the lifecycle modeler the complexity intrinsic in having to access and manage a variety of resources, which differ in nature, in the operations that are allowed on them, and in the protocols and data formats required to access them.
Resource Space Management Systems

Marcos Baez, and Fabio Casati

In 2009 Seventh IEEE European Conference on Web Services, Nov 2009

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Liquidpub is an EU project within the "future and emerging technologies" category whose goal is to capture the lessons learned and opportunities provided by the Web and open source, agile software development to develop concepts, models, metrics, and science support services for an efficient (for people), effective (for science), and sustainable (for publishers and the community) way of creating, disseminating, evaluating, and consuming scientific knowledge. Novel services for science are a hot topic these days. From social bookmarking sites to online ranking of scientists, these services try to assist scientists in sharing content and assessing people and their scientific contributions. These services are however still very much anchored to a traditional notion of publication and are only scratching the surface of what can be done to help scientists collaborate for the greater good.
Gelee: Cooperative lifecycle management for (composite) artifacts

Marcos Baez, Cristhian Parra, Fabio Casati, and 6 more authors

In Service-Oriented Computing, Nov 2009

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In this demonstration we introduce Gelee, our online platform for the hosted specification and cooperative execution of lifecycles of artifacts of any kind. With Gelee we aim at filling two lacks we identify in current cooperative software systems when it comes to unstructured, artifact-based works (e.g., the writing of a project deliverable): the lack of state and the complete lack of automated actions. Lifecycles allow us to model the state of any object, and if we focus on online resources (e.g., a Google Doc) then we can also automate some lifecycle actions. If we apply Gelee to composite artifacts, e.g., a set of web services, lifecycles provide for the human-driven orchestration of services.
Towards an Abstraction Layer for Scientific Services

Marcos Baez

In ICSOC/ServiceWave 2009 PhD Symposium, Nov 2009

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This paper presents a platform that facilitates building scientific ser- vices on top. We describe the problems in building such services and derive a general-purpose, extensible layer for accessing any resource that has a URI and is accessible on the Web. The platform, and more in general the classes of sys- tems that have this functionality, is referred to as Resource Space Management System and is the (scientific) resource analogous of a data space management system. In this paper we describe the model and conceptual architecture of the platform, discuss its benefits and outline the research plan for its realization.