Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

A review of nature-based solutions for greywater treatment: Applications, hydraulic design, and environmental benefits

Abstract Recognizing greywater as a relevant secondary source of water and nutrients represents an important chance for the sustainable management of water resource. In the last two decades, many studies analysed the environmental, economic, and energetic benefits of the reuse of greywater treated by nature-based solutions (NBS). This work reviews existing case studies of traditional constructed wetlands and new integrated technologies (e.g., green roofs and green walls) for greywater treatment and reuse, with a specific focus on their treatment performance as a function of hydraulic operating parameters. The aim of this work is to understand if the application of NBS can represent a valid alternative to conventional treatment technologies, providing quantitative indications for their design. Specifically, indications concerning threshold values of hydraulic design parameters to guarantee high removal performance are suggested. Finally, the existing literature on life cycle analysis of NBS for greywater treatment has been examined, confirming the provided environmental benefits

Object Duplicate Detection

With the technological evolution of digital acquisition and storage technologies, millions of images and video sequences are captured every day and shared in online services. One way of exploring this huge volume of images and videos is through searching a particular object depicted in images or videos by making use of object duplicate detection. Therefore, need of research on object duplicate detection is validated by several image and video retrieval applications, such as tag propagation, augmented reality, surveillance, mobile visual search, and television statistic measurement. Object duplicate detection is detecting visually same or very similar object to a query. Input is not restricted to an image, it can be several images from an object or even it can be a video. This dissertation describes the author's contribution to solve problems on object duplicate detection in computer vision. A novel graph-based approach is introduced for 2D and 3D object duplicate detection in still images. Graph model is used to represent the 3D spatial information of the object based on the local features extracted from training images so that an explicit and complex 3D object modeling is avoided. Therefore, improved performance can be achieved in comparison to existing methods in terms of both robustness and computational complexity. Our method is shown to be robust in detecting the same objects even when images containing the objects are taken from very different viewpoints or distances. Furthermore, we apply our object duplicate detection method to video, where the training images are added iteratively to the video sequence in order to compensate for 3D view variations, illumination changes and partial occlusions. Finally, we show several mobile applications for object duplicate detection, such as object recognition based museum guide, money recognition or flower recognition. General object duplicate detection may fail to detection chess figures, however considering context, like chess board position and height of the chess figure, detection can be more accurate. We show that user interaction further improves image retrieval compared to pure content-based methods through a game, called Epitome

Designing for Shareable Interfaces in the Wild

Despite excitement about the potential of interactive tabletops to support collaborative work, there have been few empirical demonstrations of their effectiveness (Marshall et al., 2011). In particular, while lab-based studies have explored the effects of individual design features, there has been a dearth of studies evaluating the success of systems in the wild. For this technology to be of value, designers and systems builders require a better understanding of how to develop and evaluate tabletop applications to be deployed in real world settings. This dissertation reports on two systems designed through a process that incorporated ethnography-style observations, iterative design and in the wild evaluation. The first study focused on collaborative learning in a medical setting. To address the fact that visitors to a hospital emergency ward were leaving with an incomplete understanding of their diagnosis and treatment, a system was prototyped in a working Emergency Room (ER) with doctors and patients. The system was found to be helpful but adoption issues hampered its impact. The second study focused on a planning application for visitors to a tourist information centre. Issues and opportunities for a successful, contextually-fitted system were addressed and it was found to be effective in supporting group planning activities by novice users, in particular, facilitating users’ first experiences, providing effective signage and offering assistance to guide the user through the application. This dissertation contributes to understanding of multi-user systems through literature review of tabletop systems, collaborative tasks, design frameworks and evaluation of prototypes. Some support was found for the claim that tabletops are a useful technology for collaboration, and several issues were discussed. Contributions to understanding in this field are delivered through design guidelines, heuristics, frameworks, and recommendations, in addition to the two case studies to help guide future tabletop system creators

Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001

This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences

Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001

This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences

Museum of Contemporary Commodities: a research performance

The materialities and injustices of the 'prolific present' are overwhelming, making attention to the production, consumption and disposal of 'stuff' an urgent matter of concern. Presenting as automatic and only partially visible, creatively constructive acts of ‘dataveillance’ are integral to this explosion of stuff; conditioning our daily lives as milieus of consumption that channel profit to the propertied classes, often with socially and environmentally damaging consequences (Gabrys 2016, van Dijck, 2014, Tsing, 2013). Constructing the agency to intervene in these socio-technical valuing practices and cultural performances, requires us to consider our roles in those performances, as much as theorising the constituting structures, strategies, and (in)justices of their production. The Museum of Contemporary Commodities is an art geography research performance that is both a collaboratively produced dramaturgy of valuing, and an experiment in public curation as transformative process (Heathfield 2016, Graeber, 2013, Richter 2017). The project manifests as a series of digitally networked hacks, prototypes and events that attempt to configure new alignments between the social, material and digital that are localised and mobile, stable and reconfigurable, familiar and new (Suchman et al., 2002). These are art geographies as collectively produced critical making and social practices, which encourage audience-as-participant move from 'automatic' taking part in the unfolding immanence of the world, to feeling it more deeply. By extension attending to and caring for the ethical and political implications, and the material things that participation produces (Cull, 2011, Puig de la Bellacasa 2012)

The student-produced electronic portfolio in craft education

The authors studied primary school students’ experiences of using an electronic portfolio in their craft education over four years. A stimulated recall interview was applied to collect user experiences and qualitative content analysis to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that the electronic portfolio was experienced as a multipurpose tool to support learning. It makes the learning process visible and in that way helps focus on and improves the quality of learning. © ISLS.Peer reviewe

Computational Intelligence and Human- Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications

The present book contains all of the articles that were accepted and published in the Special Issue of MDPI’s journal Mathematics titled "Computational Intelligence and Human–Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications". This Special Issue covered a wide range of topics connected to the theory and application of different computational intelligence techniques to the domain of human–computer interaction, such as automatic speech recognition, speech processing and analysis, virtual reality, emotion-aware applications, digital storytelling, natural language processing, smart cars and devices, and online learning. We hope that this book will be interesting and useful for those working in various areas of artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, and software engineering as well as for those who are interested in how these domains are connected in real-life situations