Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Teachers’ Perspective on Artificial Intelligence Education: an Initial Investigation

Learning about Artificial Intelligence (AI) from a young age can help students become competent citizens able to move through our increasingly digital world with confidence and responsibility. This contribution presents a preliminary investigation in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and Romania to understand middle school teachers’ perspective on how to best teach digital competencies for AI. It uses the Will, Skill, Tool model as a theoretical lens, and it aims to inform the design of educational content and online platforms to enable teachers to integrate AI education into their classroom. Through a human-centred design process – including focus groups and a survey – needs and requirements were identified for a supportive online educational platform that aids teachers in AI education. The research results showed a positive attitude towards AI education and high motivation to introduce AI-related content at school, which translates to a positive Will factor. Regarding the Skill factor, teachers seem to have a basic level of digital skills but low AI-related skills. No significant problems emerged regarding the availability of resources, but further research investigating whether the Tool factor is accounted for would be desirable. Based on the results, six design implications for a web-based educational platform on AI have been formulated: (i) provide the required basics; (ii) make it relevant; (iii) make it interactive and collaborative; (iv) keep everyone in the loop; (v) make it accessible; (vi) motivate the user. These implications are further discussed to extend computational thinking frameworks to incorporate AI-related concepts and perspectives.
ReCompFig: Designing Dynamically Reconfigurable Kinematic Devices Using Compliant Mechanisms and Tensioning Cables

From creating input devices to rendering tangible information, the field of HCI is interested in using kinematic mechanisms to create human-computer interfaces. Yet, due to fabrication and design challenges, it is often difficult to create kinematic devices that are compact and have multiple reconfigurable motional degrees of freedom (DOFs) depending on the interaction scenarios. In this work, we combine compliant mechanisms (CMs) with tensioning cables to create dynamically reconfigurable kinematic mechanisms. The devices’ kinematics (DOFs) is enabled and determined by the layout of bendable rods. The additional cables function as on-demand motion constraints that can dynamically lock or unlock the mechanism's DOFs as they are tightened or loosened. We provide algorithms and a design tool prototype to help users design such kinematic devices. We also demonstrate various HCI use cases including a kinematic haptic display, a haptic proxy, and a multimodal input device.
Hey Alexa, Who Am I Talking to?: Analyzing Users’ Perception and Awareness Regarding Third-party Alexa Skills

The Amazon Alexa voice assistant provides convenience through automation and control of smart home appliances using voice commands. Amazon allows third-party applications known as skills to run on top of Alexa to further extend Alexa’s capability. However, as multiple skills can share the same invocation phrase and request access to sensitive user data, growing security and privacy concerns surround third-party skills. In this paper, we study the availability and effectiveness of existing security indicators or a lack thereof to help users properly comprehend the risk of interacting with different types of skills. We conduct an interactive user study (inviting active users of Amazon Alexa) where participants listen to and interact with real-world skills using the official Alexa app. We find that most participants fail to identify the skill developer correctly (i.e., they assume Amazon also develops the third-party skills) and cannot correctly determine which skills will be automatically activated through the voice interface. We also propose and evaluate a few voice-based skill type indicators, showcasing how users would benefit from such voice-based indicators.
TempSeat: Investigating the Suitability of a Heated Car Seat for Feedback Purposes

Thermal cues in the car can be used as an alternative to audio and vibration feedback to lessen the burden on the often overloaded visual channel. This paper presents an investigation of a heated car seat to evaluate the effectiveness of the heating for feedback purposes. The temperature changes of a heated car seat were measured without and with seated passengers to assess the heating capabilities in general and to understand the temperature interaction with a seated person. A user study (N=12) investigated the recognition times during a simulated driving task. Temperature changes during driving simulation were detected on average in under 1min, with an average increase of around 0.33℃ on the backrest (0.36℃ on seat). These initial results can be used as basis and inspiration for further investigations to lessen the visual channel with thermal cues.
Co11ab: Augmenting Accessibility in Synchronous Collaborative Writing for People with Vision Impairments

Collaborative writing is an integral part of academic and professional work. Although some prior research has focused on accessibility in collaborative writing, we know little about how visually impaired writers work in real-time with sighted collaborators or how online editing tools could better support their work. Grounded in formative interviews and observations with eight screen reader users, we built Co11ab, a Google Docs extension that provides configurable audio cues to facilitate understanding who is editing (or edited) what and where in a shared document. Results from a design exploration with fifteen screen reader users, including three naturalistic sessions of use with sighted colleagues, reveal how screen reader users understand various auditory representations and use them to coordinate real-time collaborative writing. We revisit what collaboration awareness means for screen reader users and discuss design considerations for future systems.
Interest Development Theory in Computing Education: A Framework and Toolkit for Researchers and Designers

Computing is rapidly becoming a critical literacy for succeeding in an increasingly technological world. While the proliferation of programs dedicated to broadening participation in computing increases access, computing education research can benefit from more directly drawing on current interest development theory to improve interventions that increase the desire to participate and persist in computing. In this article, we present an overview of current interest development theory and provide guidance to computing education researchers on ways to ground their conceptualization and measurement of interest in contemporary theory and inform ways of interweaving interest theory throughout intervention or curriculum design. The central contribution of this work is presenting the Integrated Interest Development for Computing Education Framework. This framework is organized around three central dimensions of interest: value, knowledge, and belonging. For each of these dimensions, the framework presents key factors that link the dimension to strategies that can be employed in computing education contexts to help develop interest. The article also describes methods of measuring interest in computing that are consistent with interest development theory, and provides examples and resources for validated measures of interest. We conclude with a discussion of the implications and potential for improving the conceptualization and measurement of interest development in computing education and future work needed to advance an understanding of how interest in computing develops that can lead to improving the design of computing educational programs to support interest development.
Bringing Patient Mannequins to Life: 3D Projection Enhances Nursing Simulation

Mannequin-based simulations are widely used to train novice nurses. However, current mannequins have no dynamic facial expressions, which decreases the mannequins’ fidelity and impacts students’ learning outcomes and experience. This study proposes a projection-based AR system for overlaying dynamic facial expressions on a mannequin and implements the system in a stroke simulation. Thirty-six undergraduate nursing students participated in the study and were equally divided into the control (without the system) and experimental group (with the system). The participants’ gaze behavior, simulation performance, and subjective evaluation were measured. Results illustrated that the participants focused more on the face-animated mannequin than the traditional mannequin during the simulation. Nursing experts believed that the face-animated mannequin increased the participants’ performance in recognizing deviations but decreased their performance in seeking additional information. Moreover, the participants reported that the face-animated mannequin was more interactive and helpful for performing appropriate assessments than the traditional mannequin.
Programmable Peripheral Vision: augment/reshape human visual perception

Over time our daily visual tasks become more complex continuously, however, the natural adaptation of our visual system does not adapt as fast as the living environment changes. As the representations of this unbalanced trend, concentration difficulty and visual overload are experienced and studied intensively. As well as universal motion sickness occurs in both real-life and virtual environments. Besides, online learning and co-working experience are far from satisfactory, which is partly due to lacking engagement and instantaneous visual interaction that we used to have when conducting those activities offline. Thus, my goal is to propose methods helping us better adapt to rapidly changing visual contexts. In the formative research, I created dynamic peripheral vision blocking glasses, and its experimental result indicates that wearing such glasses helped its users suffer fewer motion sickness symptoms while accessing fast-moving surrounding scenery in a VR environment. For the following studies, I am creating dynamic saliency adjusting glasses and gaze guiding glasses to augment and reshape daily-life visual perception.
Analysis of four-bar planar mechanisms with joint clearances

This work deals with four-bar planar mechanisms with clearances at the joints, which induce unilateral constraints, impacts and friction, rendering the dynamics nonsmooth. The objective is to determine sets of parameters (clearance value, restitution coefficients, friction coefficients) such that the system's trajectories stay in a neighborhood of the trajectories of mechanism with no clearance. The analysis is based on numerical simulations obtained with the projected Moreau-Jean time-stepping scheme.
A Complex Human-Machine Coordination Problem: Essential Constraints on Interaction Control in Bionic Communication Systems

Novel voice enhancements for larynx amputees utilize a variety of wearable interfaces and/or artificial intelligence. However, the problem formulation remains posed as “voice restoration”, which stems from common, but limiting, assumptions about communication as a reliable signal transfer, in which “signal” equals to voice. Yet beyond this signal transfer, the vital part of communication is mutual influence. During conversations people coordinate their movement dynamics, i.e. adjust speech timing, intonation and gestures. By taking this perspective, informed by the newest trends in the cognitive sciences (ecological, enacted, extended cognition) as well as recent studies on human-machine integration, we seek to shed new light on the processes of analysis and evaluation of specific systems for laryngectomees. We propose the integrated framework which enables us to interpret bionic communicative interfaces as parts of distributed cognitive systems that allow for different level of control over interactions. This paper analyses 5 bionic systems, consisting of a laryngectomee supported with i) voice copy, ii) voice conversion, iii) silent speech iv) bionic voice or v) lean-AI interfaces. We demonstrate how using the broader perspective leads to noticing important aspects of communication and informs a more human-centered design and evaluation. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI) → HCI theory, concepts and models • Human-centered computing → Interaction design → Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms
The Melody of the Mysterious Stones: A VR Mindfulness Game Using Sound Spatialization

The Melody of Mysterious Stones is a VR meditation game that utilizes spatial audio technologies. One of the most common mindfulness exercises is to notice and observe five senses including the sense of sound. As a way of helping the players with focusing on their sense of sound, the Melody of Mysterious Stones makes use of spatialized sounds as game elements. Our play tests showed that game players enjoyed playing missions with spatial audio elements. Also, they reported that spatial audio helped them with focusing on their sense of sound and therefore felt more engaged in meditation materials.
Pet-Robot or Appliance? Care Home Residents with Dementia Respond to a Zoomorphic Floor Washing Robot

Any active entity that shares space with people is interpreted as a social actor. Based on this notion, we explore how robots that integrate functional utility with a social role and character can integrate meaningfully into daily practice. Informed by interviews and observations, we designed a zoomorphic floor cleaning robot which playfully interacts with care home residents affected by dementia. A field study shows that playful interaction can facilitate the introduction of utilitarian robots in care homes, being nonthreatening and easy to make sense of. Residents previously reacted with distress to a Roomba robot, but were now amused by and played with our cartoonish cat robot or simply tolerated its presence. They showed awareness of the machine-nature of the robot, even while engaging in pretend-play. A playful approach to the design of functional robots can thus explicitly conceptualize such robots as social actors in their context of use.
Estudio de la Carta Ewma en presencia de datos auto correlacionados

Control charts are traditionally applied to industrial processes, assuming that the observations sequence does not have any autocorrelation, but this assumption is frequently violated in practice. The presence of autocorrelation has a serious impact on the performance of control charts, causing a dramatic increase in the frequency of false alarms. This paper presents the construction and implementation form of the chart of exponentially weighted moving average EWMA, in presence of auto correlated data proposed by Montgomery, D.C. y Mastrangelo, C.M. (1991), through a programming routine and its application to a model of autoregressive-moving average model ARMA(p, q), obtained by simulation.
It’s Touching: Understanding Touch-Affect Association in Shape-Change with Kinematic Features

With the proliferation of shape-change research in affective computing, there is a need to deepen understandings of affective responses to shape-change display. Little research has focused on affective reactions to tactile experiences in shape-change, particularly in the absence of visual information. It is also rare to study response to the shape-change as it unfolds, isolated from a final shape-change outcome. We report on two studies on touch-affect associations, using the crossmodal “Bouba-Kiki” paradigm, to understand affective responses to shape-change as it unfolds. We investigate experiences with a shape-change gadget, as it moves between rounded (“Bouba”) and spiky (“Kiki”) forms. We capture affective responses via the circumplex model, and use a motion analysis approach to understand the certainty of these responses. We find that touch-affect associations are influenced by both the size and the frequency of the shape-change and may be modality-dependent, and that certainty in affective associations is influenced by association-consistency.
Designing Tools and Interfaces for Ecological Restoration: An Investigation into the Opportunities and Constraints for Technological Interventions

As interest within the HCI community expands beyond urban settings, novel tools and devices are being developed to support more sustainable interactions with natural environments and inform conservation action. Yet little is known about the users of these devices, and how their requirements and priorities might affect the usability or operationalization of the devices in the real world. Using the ‘e-seed’, a biomimetic self-drilling interface as a ‘research probe’, we conducted a qualitative user study with 14 subject matter experts in areas like forestry and agriculture to understand the value and limits for devices and systems in ecological restoration and monitoring. We highlight unique challenges in existing ecological practices, opportunities for technological interventions, and the policies and economic constraints affecting the feasibility of such interventions. We present a set of critical design considerations for building and deploying novel devices in natural and semi-natural ecosystems and discuss implications for future research.
Two Heads Are Better Than One: A Dimension Space for Unifying Human and Artificial Intelligence in Shared Control

Shared control is an emerging interaction paradigm in which a human and an AI partner collaboratively control a system. Shared control unifies human and artificial intelligence, making the human’s interactions with computers more accessible, safe, precise, effective, creative, and playful. This form of interaction has independently emerged in contexts as varied as mobility assistance, driving, surgery, and digital games. These domains each have their own problems, terminology, and design philosophies. Without a common language for describing interactions in shared control, it is difficult for designers working in one domain to share their knowledge with designers working in another. To address this problem, we present a dimension space for shared control, based on a survey of 55 shared control systems from six different problem domains. This design space analysis tool enables designers to classify existing systems, make comparisons between them, identify higher-level design patterns, and imagine solutions to novel problems.
Virtual Painkillers: Designing Accessible Virtual Reality Experiences for Helping Cancer Patients Manage Pain at Home

More than half of cancer patients are dealing with moderately severe pain on a monthly basis and most of them report a breakthrough pain experience at least once. Despite the importance of pain management for cancer patients, cancer pain remains undertreated. With computer technology and especially Virtual Reality offering open endless opportunities for pain management, we must consider how low-cost home-based Virtual Reality for cancer patients can be sensitively designed to provide comfortable, enriching pain management experiences. Working closely with 51 cancer patients, medical and paramedical personnel, we co-designed an intelligent personalized mobile application to first collect ecologically momentary assessment data on symptoms like pain and fatigue and Health-Related Quality of Life and subsequently enhance symptom management of cancer patients at home. Through this paper, we thoroughly explain the screening process and quantitative analysis we run to identify which environments patients would like to receive as a Virtual Reality intervention that can facilitate the design of Virtual Reality interventions for cancer patients.
Who am I, and who are you, and who are we? A Scientometric Analysis of Gender and Geography in HCI

Conference authorship, attendance and presentation is a key measure of quality in the HCI academic, yet we know conferences are not equally accessible for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. In this paper we examine two axes of diversity: gender, and geographic location (of both authors and conferences) and examine how they affect participation at major HCI conferences. Diversity in a group is associated with better outcomes from its work, and HCI has made numerous contributions to increasing representation in other communities. Reflecting on our own situation can produce recommendations for the planning of future HCI conferences, and identify challenges of representation that the HCI community should endeavor to address.
Developing Intentional Relationships with Technologies: Exploring Players’ Tension between Play and Non-play and Designing Built-in Interventions to Contribute to Digital Well-Being

The dark side of technology, such as technology overuse, has received growing concern. Prior studies have developed a variety of stand-alone techniques to support technology non-use, but few have attempted to build interventions directly into technologies to regulate usage. My research seeks to address this issue in the context of games by exploring the relationship players intend to have with games, especially their desired balance between play and non-play, and designing built-in interventions in games to help support this relationship. I will conduct qualitative interviews to understand players’ ideal relationships with games, and quantitative experiments to investigate the impact of built-in interventions on such relationships. Through these investigations, I attempt to develop a theoretical framework to understand users’ intended relationship with technologies and provide guidance on intervention designs that contribute to digital well-being.
Debiased Label Aggregation for Subjective Crowdsourcing Tasks

Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) allow people to collect and curate labeled data from multiple annotators. Then labels are often aggregated to create an annotated dataset suitable for supervised machine learning tasks. The most popular label aggregation method is majority voting, where each item in the dataset is assigned the most common label from the annotators. This approach is optimal when annotators are unbiased domain experts. In this paper, we propose Debiased Label Aggregation (DLA) an alternative method for label aggregation in subjective HITs, where cross-annotator agreement varies. DLA leverages user voting behavior patterns to weight labels. Our experiments show that DLA outperforms majority voting in several performance metrics; e.g. a percentage increase of 20 points in the F1 measure before data augmentation, and a percentage increase of 35 points in the same measure after data augmentation. Since DLA is deceptively simple, we hope it will help researchers to tackle subjective labeling tasks.
Tech Help Desk: Support for Local Entrepreneurs Addressing the Long Tail of Computing Challenges

Even entrepreneurs whose businesses are not technological (e.g., handmade goods) need to be able to use a wide range of computing technologies in order to achieve their business goals. In this paper, we follow a participatory action research approach and collaborate with various stakeholders at an entrepreneurial co-working space to design “Tech Help Desk”, an on-going technical service for entrepreneurs. Our model for technical assistance is strategic, in how it is designed to fit the context of local entrepreneurs, and responsive, in how it prioritizes emergent needs. From our engagements with 19 entrepreneurs and support personnel, we reflect on the challenges with existing technology support for non-technological entrepreneurs. Our work highlights the importance of ensuring technological support services can adapt based on entrepreneurs’ ever-evolving priorities, preferences and constraints. Furthermore, we find technological support services should maintain broad technical support for entrepreneurs’ long tail of computing challenges.