Abstract: Motivation is a key factor for introducing and maintaining healthy changes in behaviour. However, typical visualization methods (e.g., bar-, pie-, and line charts) hardly motivate individuals. We investigate how a plant---a living visualization---whose health relies on the plant owner's level of activity, can engage people in tracking and self-reflecting on their fitness data. To address this question, we designed, implemented, and studied Go & Grow, a living plant that receives water proportionally to its owner's activity. Our six-week qualitative study with ten participants suggests that living visualizations have qualities that their digital counterparts do not have. This includes people feeling: emotionally connected to their plant; sentiments such as pride and guilt; and responsibility towards their plant. Based on this study, we introduce the Goal Motivation Model, a model considering the diversity of individuals, thus supporting and encouraging a diversity of strategies for accomplishing goals.

Abstract: Targeted advertising reaches users based on various traits, such as demographics or behaviour. However, users are often reluctant to accept ads. We hypothesise that users are more open to targeted advertising if they can inspect, control and thereby understand the process of ad selection. We conducted a between-subjects study (N=200) to investigate to what extent four key aspects of ads (Quality, Behavioural Intention, Understanding and Attitude) may be affected by transparency and user control using a flow chart. Our results indicate that positive effects of flow charts reported from other domains may also be applicable to advertising: Using flow charts to provide transparency together with user control is found to have more positive effects on domain-specific quality measures than established, text-based approaches and using either of the techniques in isolation. The paper concludes with recommendations for practitioners aiming to improve user response to ads.

Abstract: Image collections are a common interaction pattern for 2D interfaces, however mid-air user interaction with collections has received little attention We present a controlled experiment (within-groups, n=24) comparing three sets of hand gestures for mid-air browsing and selection in image collections, that were identified out of an elicitation study, using MS Kinect Each set includes cursor-less gestures for browsing (sideways hand extension, wheel and swipe) and for selection/deselection (hand-up/hand-down) Task success was universal with high accuracy and few errors for all gestures Sideways extension outperforms swipe and perceived effort for this gesture is significantly lower Both gestures outperform wheel We suggest that from a usability perspective, sideways hand extension should be preferred for browsing image galleries, if no other contextual factors apply Also, the results of the elicitation study, in which most users proposed the swipe gesture for browsing, were not confirmed by the controlled usability experiment This suggests a combined use of elicitation studies with rigorous usability testing, especially when gestures for particular user interface design patterns are sought

Abstract: Over the last decade, we have witnessed an emergence of Personal Information Management (PIM) solutions. Despite the fact that paper documents still form a significant part of our daily working activities, existing PIM systems usually support the organisation and re-finding of digital documents only. While physical document tracking solutions such as RFID- or computer vision-based systems are recently gaining some attention, they usually focus on the paper document tracking and offer limited support for re-finding activities. We present PimVis, a solution for exploring and re-finding digital and paper documents in so-called cross-media information spaces. The PimVis user interface enables a unified organisation of digital and paper documents through the creation of bidirectional links between the digital and physical information space. The presented personal cross-media information management solution further supports the extension with alternative document tracking techniques as well as augmented reality solutions. A formative PimVis evaluation revealed the high potential of fully integrated cross-media PIM solutions.

Abstract: Our research aims at supporting existing therapies for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The personal and social autonomy is the desired end state to be achieved to enable a smooth integration in the real world. We developed and tested a framework for storytelling and learning activities that exploits an immersive virtual reality viewer to interact with target users. Our system uses Google Cardboard platform to enhance existing therapies for IDD and ASD children, enabling caregivers to supervise and personalize single therapeutic sessions. This way curative meetings can be adapted for each child's specific need accordingly to the severity of their disabilities. We co-designed our system with experts from the medical sector, identifying features that allow patients to stay focused on the task to perform. Our approach triggers a learning process for a seamless assimilation of common behavioral skills useful in every day's life. This paper highlights the technologic challenges in healthcare and discusses cutting-edge interaction paradigms. Among those challenges, we try to identify the best solution to support advanced visual interfaces for an interactive storytelling experience. Furthermore, this work reports our preliminary experimental results from a still ongoing evaluation with IDD and ASD children and discusses the benefits and flaws of our approach. On the one hand, we explore children reaction to - and acceptance of - the viewer, on the other hand, therapists' ease of use when interacting with our framework. We conclude this paper with few considerations on our approach.

Abstract: Public displays have lately become ubiquitous thanks to the decreasing cost of such technology and public policies supporting the development of smart cities. Depending on form factor, those displays might use touchless gestural interfaces that therefore are becoming more often the subject of public and private research. In this paper, we focus on touchless interactions with situated public displays, and introduce a pilot study on comparing two interfaces: an interface based on the Microsoft Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), a de facto standard in the field, and a novel interface, designed by us. Differently from the HIG-based one, our interface displays an avatar, which does not require any activation gestures to trigger actions. Our aim is to study how the two interfaces address the so-called interaction blindness --- the inability of the users to recognize the interactive capabilities of those displays. According to our pilot study, although providing a different approach, both interfaces has proven effective in the proposed scenario: a public display in a hall inside a University campus building.

Abstract: This paper introduces an approach to develop an up-to-date reference model that can support advanced visual user interfaces for distributed Big Data Analysis in virtual labs to be used in e-Science, industrial research, and Data Science education. The paper introduces and motivates the current situation in this application area as a basis for a corresponding problem statement that is utilized to derive goals and objectives of the approach. Furthermore, the relevant state-of-the-art is revisited and remaining challenges are identified. An exemplar set of use cases, corresponding user stereotypes as well as a conceptual design model to address these challenges are introduced. A corresponding architectural system model is suggested as a conceptual reference architecture to support proof-of-concept implementations as well as to support interoperability in distributed infrastructures. Conclusions and an outlook on future work complete the paper.

Abstract: New technologies for innovative interactive experience represent a powerful medium to deliver cultural heritage content to a wider range of users. Among them, Natural User Interfaces (NUI), i.e. non-intrusive technologies not requiring to the user to wear devices nor use external hardware (e.g. keys or trackballs), are considered a promising way to broader the audience of specific cultural heritage domains, like the navigation/interaction with digital artworks presented on wall-sized displays. Starting from a collaboration with a worldwide famous Italian designer, we defined a NUI to explore 360 panoramic artworks presented on wall-sized displays, like virtual reconstruction of ancient cultural sites, or rendering of imaginary places. Specifically, we let the user to "move the head" as way of natural interaction to explore and navigate through these large digital artworks. To this aim, we developed a system including a remote head pose estimator to catch movements of users standing in front of the wall-sized display: starting from a central comfort zone, as users move their head in any direction, the virtual camera rotates accordingly. With NUIs, it is difficult to get feedbacks from the users about the interest for the point of the artwork he/she is looking at. To solve this issue, we complemented the gaze estimator with a preliminary emotional analysis solution, able to implicitly infer the interest of the user for the shown content from his/her pupil size. A sample of 150 subjects was invited to experience the proposed interface at an International Design Week. Preliminary results show that the most of the subjects were able to properly interact with the system from the very first use, and that the emotional module is an interesting solution, even if further work must be devoted to address specific situations.

Abstract: In the field of Web usability evaluation, one potential effective approach is the usage of logging tools for remote usability analysis (i.e. tools capable of tracking and recording the users' activities while they interact with a Web site), and then presenting the recorded data to usability experts in such a way to support detection of possible usability problems. In the design of such automated tools, in addition to the problems related to user behavior recording, another important issue is the choice of meaningful visual representations in order to support the usability expert analysis. In this paper we present a timeline-based system for interactive events visualization, which has been exploited in a proxy-based mobile Web usability evaluation tool. We discuss how such visualizations can be exploited in finding usability issues and the type of problems that can be detected through them. We show various ways to compare timelines related to users sessions with ideal timelines representing optimal behavior.

Abstract: We present YouTouch!, a system that tracks users in front of an interactive display wall and associates touches with users. With their large size, display walls are inherently suitable for multi-user interaction. However, current touch recognition technology does not distinguish between users, making it hard to provide personalized user interfaces or access to private data. In our system we place a commodity RGB + depth camera in front of the wall, allowing us to track users and correlate them with touch events. While the camera's driver is able to track people, it loses the user's ID whenever she is occluded or leaves the scene. In these cases, we re-identify the person by means of a descriptor comprised of color histograms of body parts and skeleton-based biometric measurements. Additional processing reliably handles short-term occlusion as well as assignment of touches to occluded users. YouTouch! requires no user instrumentation nor custom hardware, and there is no registration nor learning phase. Our system was thoroughly tested with data sets comprising 81 people, demonstrating its ability to re-identify users and correlate them to touches even under adverse conditions.

Abstract: Intrapersonal synchronization of limb movements is a relevant feature for assessing coordination of motoric behavior. In this paper, we show that it can also distinguish between full-body movements performed with different expressive qualities, namely rigidity, fluidity, and impulsivity. For this purpose, we collected a dataset of movements performed by professional dancers, and annotated the perceived movement qualities with the help of a group of experts in expressive movement analysis. We computed intra personal synchronization by applying the Event Synchronization algorithm to the time-series of the speed of arms and hands. Results show that movements performed with different qualities display a significantly different amount of intra personal synchronization: impulsive movements are the most synchronized, the fluid ones show the lowest values of synchronization, and the rigid ones lay in between.

Abstract: A novel framework that allows designers without 3D-modelling experience to draw three-dimensional panoramic sketches by hand with the help of a support lines is proposed Sketches are viewed with panoramic viewing software, giving observers interactive three-dimensional 360-degree immersed experiences

Abstract: One challenge with modern smartwatches is text input. In this paper we explore the use of gestural interaction with a smartwatch to support text input. The inertial measurement unit of a smartwatch is used to capture gestural interaction by a user, and an external display is used to provide feedback. We examine two specific variants of gesture keyboards: the swype keyboard common on modern smartphones and the cirrin keyboard, a gestural keyboard that supports character input via directional gestures. We show, first, that freearm gestural input as sensed by a smartwatch exhibits similar efficiency as freearm gestural input sensed by motion capture systems. As well, we show that the smartwatch inertial measurement unit can support text input on ubiquitous computing displays.

Abstract: Our research aims at helping children with intellectual disability (ID) to "learn through play" by interacting with digitally enriched physical toys Inspired by the practice of Dolphin Therapy (a special form of Pet Therapy) and, specifically, by the activities that ID children perform at Dolphinariums, we have developed a "smart" stuffed dolphin called SAM that engages children in a variety of play tasks SAM emits different stimuli (sound, vibration, and light) with its body in response to children's manipulation Its behavior is integrated with lights and multimedia animations or video displayed in the ambient and can be customized by therapists to address the specific needs of each child

Abstract: Big data analytics in healthcare would be almost useless, without suitable tools allowing users "see" them, and gain insight for their situated decisions. The VVH (Valuable Visualization in Healthcare) workshop focuses on the role of interactive data visualization tools by which people can make sense of healthcare data; these data include sensor data, the messages exchanged in social media, the emails between patients and their doctors, the content of patient records as well as the discussions among different specialists that led to such record content. All these data are used by different types of users, like doctors, nurses, policy makers and common citizens. The VVH workshop aims at contributing on: the assessment of the usability of advanced interactive tools of health-related data visualization; the assessment of the quality of the information and value for insight that these tools make available to their users; the collection of reports of either success stories or failures in the appropriation and use of complex and multidimensional healthcare datasets; the collection of methodological and design-oriented contributions that could share methods, techniques, and heuristics for the design of interactive tools and applications supporting data work, data telling and data interpretation in healthcare.

Abstract: We present the groundwork for Tiles: an inventor toolbox to support the development of interactive objects by non-experts. Tiles is composed by (i) a set of physical input/output primitives to describe interaction styles with technology-augmented objects, (ii) extensible hardware modules easily embeddable in everyday things that implement the primitives, (iii) APIs to code application logics using popular programming languages. We are currently exploring the opportunities of using Tiles to develop applications for learning, games and advanced visual interfaces.

Abstract: This paper describes AmI@Home, a collaborative system prototype for smart home management and configuration In particular, the system is based on event-condition-action rules Rule construction and manipulation occur through gamification mechanisms supporting social interaction, collaboration and competition, in order to engage all family members in shaping their smart home

Abstract: In this paper we present VR GREP, an immersive End User Development (EUD) tool that supports authoring and modifying general purpose immersive VR environments, without having technical knowledge. The system aims to facilitate exploring the potential of immersive tools to support situated design practices.

Abstract: A smart context-aware mobile guide may provide the visitor with personalized relevant information from the vast amount of content available at the museum, adapted for his or her personal needs. Earlier studies relied on using sensors for location-awareness and interest detection. This work explores the potential of mobile eye-tracking and vision technology in enhancing the museum visit experience. We report here on satisfactory preliminary results from examining the performance of a mobile eye tracker in a realistic setting.

Abstract: Dynamic network visualization aims at representing the evolution of relational information in a readable, scalable, and effective way. A natural approach, called 'time-to-time mapping', consists of computing a representation of the network at each time step and animating the transition between subsequent time steps. However, recent literature recommends to represent time-related events by means of static graphic counterparts, realizing the so called 'time-to-space mapping'. This paradigm has been successfully applied to networks where nodes and edges are subject to a restricted set of events: appearances, disappearances, and attribute changes. In this paper we describe NetFork, a system that conveys the timings and the impact of path changes that occur in a routing network by suitable time-to-space metaphors, without relying on the time-to-time mapping adopted by the play-back interfaces of alternative network monitoring tools. A user study and a comparison with the state of the art show that users can leverage on high level static representations to quickly assess the quantity and quality of the path dynamics that took place in the network.

Abstract: Cultural heritage traditionally draws a lot of research attention when it comes to exploring the potential benefits from application of novel technology in realistic settings. The domain is rich of physical as well as virtual sites objects and infinite information about them. Hence, it is only natural that whenever new technology appears, it is experimented in cultural heritage -- from early dialog systems to state of the art Humanoid robots, eye trackers, virtual/augmented reality devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The AVI-CH workshop nicely demonstrate this with the diversity of topics presented by the papers accepted to the workshop.

Abstract: We designed and developed an app, for iOS and Android, which uses internal device accelerometer to detect earthquakes that may occur while the smartphone is stable on a at surface and to deliver a crowdsourced early warning to users in the region where the earthquake might be dangerous. We describe our interface for the Android operating system and we compare our system to the other main research work.

Abstract: As topic modeling has grown in popularity, tools for visualizing the process have become increasingly common. Though these tools support a variety of different tasks, they generally have a view or module that conveys the contents of an individual topic. These views support the important task of gist-forming: helping the user build a cohesive overall sense of the topic's semantic content that can be generalized outside the specific subset of words that are shown. There are a number of factors that affect these views, including the visual encoding used, the number of topic words included, and the quality of the topics themselves. To our knowledge, there has been no formal evaluation comparing the ways in which these factors might change users' interpretations. In a series of crowdsourced experiments, we sought to compare features of visual topic representations in their suitability for gist-forming. We found that gist-forming ability is remarkably resistant to changes in visual representation, though it deteriorates with topics of lower quality.

Abstract: This paper describes the process of design, implementation, and real world deployment of a web-based network exploration tool called Network Explorer. We designed Network Explorer based on the expressed needs of our clients and later deployed it as part of a larger system for fraud detection in health care. Our implementation of Network Explorer provides visual interactive access to large-scale network data. As part of the Network Explorer tool we contribute a dynamic group-in-a-box implementation for laying out clusters, and a node navigator widget that aids in the exploration of large networks. We are also contributing two open source components of the Network Explorer for the community to reuse: an in-browser clustering library, and the dynamic group-in-a-box algorithm. We have evaluated the network explorer tool in multiple real-world environments including the fraud detection setting above.

Abstract: We introduce a novel method based on physical proxies for investigating fundamental differences between touch and tangible interfaces. This method uses physical chips to emulate the flat, non-graspable objects that make up touch interfaces, in a way that supports direct comparison with tangible interfaces. We ran an experiment to test the effect of object thickness on participants' behavior, performance and subjective experience in spatial rearrangement tasks. We found that for the tasks tested, thick objects are faster but less accurate to operate, and that their graspability is only used occasionally. We also found that coarse manipulation of multiple thin objects is error-prone, an issue that only thick objects may allow to alleviate.

Abstract: In many fields of science, the numerical output of research work require proper interpretation in relation to real world situations. Graphical visualization is often used to ensure better comprehension of data (research outputs) by researchers, learners and other stakeholders. However, in the modern era, large scale experimentation as well as computer-based simulations are generating massive amounts of numeric data that are almost impossible to visualize using traditional plots and graphs as they are limited in both dimensions and scale. Video has gained increasing popularity for presenting data due to its ability to convey motion and time. While, such video presentations are undoubtedly useful, they provide limited contributions to cognitive development. In this paper, we examine a cost effective use of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) in the visualization of scientific research data highlighting two use-cases that show the Three Dimensional (3D) semi-immersive and interactive environment in both educational and non-educational contexts.

Abstract: Spreadsheets are ubiquitous, familiar, often overlooked, and embody vast financial and human investment, not least in their user interface. This paper shows how spreadsheets can be used as an integral part of interactive processes, for activities from simple data entry, to more complex grouping and linking of datasets, both as fully functional prototypes and as part of a final system. They reveal artful digital and physical end-user appropriation; exemplify key design principles including 'appropriate intelligence', ensuring 'smart' technology fits the complete human--computer process; and expose further design issues such as the importance of 'exception' sets.

Abstract: The benefits of two-point interaction for tasks that require users to simultaneously manipulate multiple entities or dimensions are widely known. Two-point interaction has become common, e.g., when zooming or pinching using two fingers on a smartphone. We propose a novel interaction technique that implements three-point interaction by augmenting two-finger direct touch with gaze as a third input channel. We evaluate two key characteristics of our technique in two multi-participant user studies. In the first, we used the technique for object selection. In the second, we evaluate it in a 3D matching task that requires simultaneous continuous input from fingers and the eyes. Our results show that in both cases participants learned to interact with three input channels without cognitive or mental overload. Participants' performance tended towards fast selection times in the first study and exhibited parallel interaction in the second. These results are promising and show that there is scope for additional input channels beyond two-point interaction.

Abstract: Handling the complexity of relevant data requires new techniques about data access, visualization, perception, and interaction for innovative and successful strategies. In order to address human-computer interaction, cognitive eficiency, and interoperability problems, a generic information visualization, user empowerment, as well as service integration and mediation approach based on the existing state-of-the-art in the relevant areas of computer science has to be achieved. This workshop will address these issues with a special focus on supporting distributed Big Data analysis in Virtual Research Environments (VREs). In this way, the overall scope and goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers in these areas to achieve a road map, which can support the acceleration in research activities by means of transforming, enriching, and deploying advanced visual user interfaces for managing and using e-Science infrastructures. Advancements in this fields of research can i.e. support the, creation, configuration, management, and usage of distributed Big Data analysis in VREs.