Using recommendations to help novices to reuse design knowledge

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21530-8_35. Copyright @ Springer 2011.The use of pattern languages is not so straightforward since its users have to identify the patterns they need, browsing the language and understanding both the benefits and trade-offs of each pattern as well as the relations and interactions it has with other patterns. Novice designers might benefit from tools that assist them in this learning task. In this paper we describe a recommendation tool embedded in a visual environment for pattern-based design which aims at suggesting patterns to help novice designers to produce better designs and understand the language.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovatio

Software environments for supporting End-User Development

Our work on End-User Development primarily focuses on the needs of a specific community of users, namely professionals in diverse areas outside of computer science, such as engineers, physicians, geologists and physicist, who are not professional programmers. We refer to them as domain experts. We developed a participatory design methodology, called SSW (Software Shaping Workshop) methodology, aimed at designing software environments that support domain experts to become co-designers of their tools. The different stakeholders can contribute their own views on the problem to design, development and maintenance of an application, using their own languages and notations. We also proposed a model of the Interaction and Co-Evolution processes (ICE model) occurring between users and system. It extends a previous model of Human-Computer Interaction by considering an important phenomenon occurring during the use of interactive systems, called co-evolution of users and systems

Spatial distribution of traffic-related pollutants from tailpipe-to-road-to-ambient: the case of ultrafine-particles

The major objective of this work was to analyse the spatial variation of traffic air pollution, especially focussing on ultrafine particles (particles smaller than 100 nm, UFPs). Measuring any potential effect of any traffic air pollutant crucially requires, indeed, a comprehensive understanding of its spatiotemporal variations and distribution. To this respect, UFPs clearly emitted by internal combustion engines are extremely variable in both space and time, and this variability is believed to be an important issue to assess traffic air pollution fate and exposure. The process from emission at the tailpipe to concentration in ambient air was analysed using a two stage structure, namely, ‘tailpipe-to-road’ and ‘road-to-ambient’. The analysis was applied firstly for major traffic air pollutants, and then to UFPs. The methodology was developed by considering air pollutants’ concentration in terms of frequency distributions (FD) of the related space series. The dilution process (indicated by a LogNormal FD) was shown to be not the dominant process to fit the spatial variations of traffic air pollutants, which were conversely found to be well-fitted by the Gaussian FD. This revealed that when traffic emissions in an urban area can be considered as sources spatially diffused (no highways, etc.), the diffusion process in the atmosphere (represented by the Gaussian FD) dominates the distribution in space of such pollutants. This level of analysis has enhanced a deeper comprehension of the problem revealing governing factors and principal components of traffic air pollution variations in both space and time, and at both the stages. There appear at least two directions to proceed from the present study. First, the pursuing towards a stage 0 for the analysis of UFPs engine-to-tailpipe. Then, the assessment of UFP spatial distribution from engine-to-tailpipe-to-road-to-ambient. This could close the circle suggested by this Ph.D., with the potential to finally indicate to what extent UFPs measured at the exhausts of a single engine could reflect the outdoor concentrations in ambient air in a whole urban area

End-user composition of interactive applications through actionable UI components

Developing interactive systems to access and manipulate data is a very tough task. In particular, the development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most time-consuming activities in the software lifecycle. This is even more demanding when data have to be retrieved by accessing flexibly different online resources. Indeed, software development is moving more and more toward composite applications that aggregate on the fly specific Web services and APIs. In this article, we present a mashup model that describes the integration, at the presentation layer, of UI components. The goal is to allow non-technical end users to visualize and manipulate (i.e., to perform actions on) the data displayed by the components, which thus become actionable UI components. This article shows how the model has guided the development of a mashup platform through which non-technical end users can create component-based interactive workspaces via the aggregation and manipulation of data fetched from distributed online resources. Due to the abundance of online data sources, facilitating the creation of such interactive workspaces is a very relevant need that emerges in different contexts. A utilization study has been performed in order to assess the benefits of the proposed model and of the Actionable UI Components; participants were required to perform real tasks using the mashup platform. The study results are reported and discussed

Preventing airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in hospitals and nursing homes

[No abstract available

Hydroamination of alkynes catalyzed by NHC-Gold(I) complexes: the non-monotonic effect of substituted arylamines on the catalyst activity

: Imines are valuable key compounds for synthesizing several nitrogen-containing molecules used in biological and industrial fields. They have been obtained, as highly regioselective Markovnikov products, by reacting several alkynes with arylamines in the presence of three new N-Heterocyclic carbene gold(I) complexes (3b, 4b, and 6b) together with the known 1-2b and 7b gold complexes as well as silver complexes 1-2a. Gold(I) complexes were investigated by means of NMR, mass spectroscopy, elemental analysis, and X-ray crystallographic studies. Accurate screening of co-catalysts and solvents led to identifying the best reaction conditions and the most active catalyst (2b) in the model hydroamination of phenylacetylene with aniline. Complex 2b was then tested in the hydroamination of alkynes with a wide variety of arylamines yielding a lower percentage of product when arylamines with both electron-withdrawing and electron-donating substituents were involved. Computational studies on the rate-determining step of hydroamination were conducted to shed light on the significantly different yields observed when reacting arylamines with different substituents

Size resolved aerosol respiratory doses in a Mediterranean urban area: From PM10 to ultrafine particles

In the framework of the 2017 "carbonaceous aerosol in Rome and Environs" (CARE) experiment, particle number size distributions have been continuously measured on February 2017 in downtown Rome. These data have been used to estimate, through MPPD model, size and time resolved particle mass, surface area and number doses deposited into the respiratory system. Dosimetry estimates are presented for PM10, PM2.5, PM1 and Ultrafine Particles (UFPs), in relation to the aerosol sources peculiar to the Mediterranean basin and to the atmospheric conditions. Particular emphasis is focused on UFPs and their fraction deposited on the olfactory bulb, in view of their possible translocation to the brain. The site of PM10 deposition within the respiratory system considerably changes, depending on the aerosol sources and then on its different size distributions. On making associations between health endpoints and aerosol mass concentrations, the relevant coarse and fine fractions would be more properly adopted, because they have different sources, different capability of penetrating deep into the respiratory system and different toxicological implications. The separation between them should be set at 1ʵm, rather than at 2.5ʵm, because the fine fraction is considerably less affected by the contribution of the natural sources. Mass dose is a suitable metric to describe coarse aerosol events but gives a poor representation of combustion aerosol. This fraction of particles, made of UFPs and of accumulation mode particles (mainly with size below 0.2ʵm), is of high health relevance. It elicited the highest oxidative activity in the CARE experiment and is properly described by the particle surface area and by the number metrics. Such metrics are even more relevant for the UFP doses deposited on the olfactory bulb, in consideration of the role recognized to oxidative stress in the progression of neurodegenerative diseases. Such metrics would be more appropriate, rather than PMx mass concentrations, to correlate neurodegenerative pathologies with aerosol pollution

Digital interaction: where are we going?

In the framework of the AVI 2018 Conference, the interuniversity center ECONA has organized a thematic workshop on "Digital Interaction: where are we going?". Six contributions from the ECONA members investigate different perspectives around this thematic