Evaluating emotion visualizations using AffectVis, an affect-aware dashboard for students

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to evaluate four visualizations that represent affective states of students. Design/methodology/approach - An empirical-experimental study approach was used to assess the usability of affective state visualizations in a learning context. The first study was conducted with students who had knowledge of visualization techniques (n=10). The insights from this pilot study were used to improve the interpretability and ease of use of the visualizations. The second study was conducted with the improved visualizations with students who had no or limited knowledge of visualization techniques (n=105). Findings - The results indicate that usability, measured by perceived usefulness and insight, is overall acceptable. However, the findings also suggest that interpretability of some visualizations, in terms of the capability to support emotional awareness, still needs to be improved. The level of students’ awareness of their emotions during learning activities based on the visualization interpretation varied depending on previous knowledge of information visualization techniques. Awareness was found to be high for the most frequently experienced emotions and activities that were the most frustrating, but lower for more complex insights such as interpreting differences with peers. Furthermore, simpler visualizations resulted in better outcomes than more complex techniques. Originality/value - Detection of affective states of students and visualizations of these states in computer-based learning environments have been proposed to support student awareness and improve learning. However, the evaluation of visualizations of these affective states with students to support awareness in real life settings is an open issue

Data Harvesting, Curation and Fusion Model to Support Public Service Recommendations for e-Governments

This work reports on early results from CITADEL project that aims at creating an ecosystem of best practices, tools, and recommendations to transform Public Administrations with more efficient, inclusive and citizen-centric services. The goal of the recommendations is to support Governments to find out why citizens stop using public services, and use this information to re-adjust provision to bring these citizens back in. Furthermore, it will help identifying why citizens are not using a given public service (due to affordability, accessibility, lack of knowledge, embarrassment, lack of interest, etc.) and, where appropriate, use this information to make public services more attractive, so they start using the services. While recommender systems can enhance experiences by providing targeted information, the entry barriers in terms of data acquisition are very high, often limiting recommender solutions to closed systems of user/context models. The main focus of this work is to provide an architectural model that allows harvesting data from various sources, curating datasets that originate from a multitude of formats and fusing them into semantically enhanced data that contain key performance indicators for the utility of e-Government services. The output can be further processed by analytics and/or recommender engines to suggest public service improvement needs.This work has been supported by EC funds from CITADEL project - Empowering Citizens To Transform European Public Administrations (H2020-SC6-CULT-COOP-2016-2017, EC Grant Agreement 726755)