LATEST PUBLICATIONS

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  • Catering for Students’ Well-Being during COVID-19 Social Distancing: A Case Study from a University Campus
  • Shuhao Ma, Marta Ferreira, Hugo Nicolau, et al. 2022. Catering for Students’ Well-Being during COVID-19 Social Distancing: A Case Study from a University Campus. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good, Association for Computing Machinery, 146–153. http://doi.org/10.1145/3524458.3547261
  • [ABSTRACT] [PDF] [LIBRARY]

  COVID-19 gave rise to discussions around designing for life during the pandemic, in particular related to health, leisure and education. In 2020, an online survey aimed at university students (N=225) pointed the authors to various challenges related to well-being in terms of studying, socializing, community, and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. These results shaped the crowdsensing-enabled service design of a mobile application, Tecnico GO!, aimed at supporting students’ well-being. Considering the constant changing context caused by the pandemic, we present a study conducted during the academic year 2021-2022 and if/how the App’s features continue to respond to student’s needs. The evaluation of the App focused on 12 semi-structured interviews and think-aloud protocols. Findings cluster around three themes: a) Supporting the study experience; b) Building a sense of community; c) Improving gamification for better participation. Discussion elaborates on the student’s perceptions around well-being during pandemics. Students’ insights of the App are overall positive and highlight that crowdsensing-enabled design does contribute to learning, community and safety, but the gamification as currently deployed does not.
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  • Catering for Students’ Well-Being during COVID-19 Social Distancing: A Case Study from a University Campus
  • Shuhao Ma, Marta Ferreira, Hugo Nicolau, et al. 2022. Catering for Students’ Well-Being during COVID-19 Social Distancing: A Case Study from a University Campus. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good, Association for Computing Machinery, 146–153. http://doi.org/10.1145/3524458.3547261
  • [ABSTRACT] [PDF] [LIBRARY]

  COVID-19 gave rise to discussions around designing for life during the pandemic, in particular related to health, leisure and education. In 2020, an online survey aimed at university students (N=225) pointed the authors to various challenges related to well-being in terms of studying, socializing, community, and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. These results shaped the crowdsensing-enabled service design of a mobile application, Tecnico GO!, aimed at supporting students’ well-being. Considering the constant changing context caused by the pandemic, we present a study conducted during the academic year 2021-2022 and if/how the App’s features continue to respond to student’s needs. The evaluation of the App focused on 12 semi-structured interviews and think-aloud protocols. Findings cluster around three themes: a) Supporting the study experience; b) Building a sense of community; c) Improving gamification for better participation. Discussion elaborates on the student’s perceptions around well-being during pandemics. Students’ insights of the App are overall positive and highlight that crowdsensing-enabled design does contribute to learning, community and safety, but the gamification as currently deployed does not.
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  • Introduction to the Special Issue on ASSETS’20
  • Georgios Kouroupetroglou and Hugo Nicolau. 2022. Introduction to the Special Issue on ASSETS’20. ACM Trans. Access. Comput. 15, 2. http://doi.org/10.1145/3542810
  • [PDF] [LIBRARY]
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  • Current Practices in Teaching Computational Thinking to Children: Accessibility as an Afterthought
  • Marta Carvalho, Filipa Rocha, João Guerreiro, Hugo Nicolau, Tiago Guerreiro, and Ana C. Pires. 2022. Current Practices in Teaching Computational Thinking to Children: Accessibility as an Afterthought. IDC Workshop on Co-designing with Mixed-ability Groups of Children to Promote Inclusive Education.
  • [ABSTRACT] [PDF]

  Recognition of computational thinking as a relevant skill set has increased its prevalence in school curricula, and the number of coding platforms and kits available. The inaccessibility of the latter has been a focus of recent attention resulting in the emergence of accessible approaches. Conversely, there has been limited attention to activities, how training platforms are being used in curricular practice, and how they are being adapted for children with disabilities. We present findings from a qualitative interview study with 6 IT instructors depicting their practices, experiences, and their views towards an inclusive future classroom.
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  • Inclusive’R’Stories: An Inclusive Storytelling Activity with an Emotional Robot
  • Cristiana Antunes, Isabel Neto, Filipa Correia, Ana Paiva, and Hugo Nicolau. 2022. Inclusive’R’Stories: An Inclusive Storytelling Activity with an Emotional Robot. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, IEEE Press, 90–100. http://doi.org/10.5555/3523760.3523776
  • [ABSTRACT] [PDF] [LIBRARY]

  Storytelling has the potential to be an inclusive and collaborative activity. However, it is unclear how interactive storytelling systems can support such activities, particularly when considering mixed-visual ability children. In this paper, we present an interactive multisensory storytelling system and explore the extent to which an emotional robot can be used to support inclusive experiences. We investigate the effect of the robot’s emotional behavior on the joint storytelling process, resulting narratives, and collaboration dynamics. Results show that when children co-create stories with a robot that exhibits emotional behaviors, they include more emotive elements in their stories and explicitly accept more ideas from their peers. We contribute with a multisensory environment that enables children with visual impairments to engage in joint storytelling activities with their peers and analyze the effect of a robot’s emotional behaviors on an inclusive storytelling experience.
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  • Investigating the Tradeoffs of Everyday Text-Entry Collection Methods Best Paper Award
  • André Rodrigues, Hugo Nicolau, André Santos, et al. 2022. Investigating the Tradeoffs of Everyday Text-Entry Collection Methods. Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery. http://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501908
  • [ABSTRACT] [PDF] [LIBRARY]

  Typing on mobile devices is a common and complex task. The act of typing itself thereby encodes rich information, such as the typing method, the context it is performed in, and individual traits of the person typing. Researchers are increasingly using a selection or combination of experience sampling and passive sensing methods in real-world settings to examine typing behaviours. However, there is limited understanding of the effects these methods have on measures of input speed, typing behaviours, compliance, perceived trust and privacy. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoffs of everyday data collection methods. We contribute empirical results from a four-week field study (N=26). Here, participants contributed by transcribing, composing, passively having sentences analyzed and reflecting on their contributions. We present a tradeoff analysis of these data collection methods, discuss their impact on text-entry applications, and contribute a flexible research platform for in the wild text-entry studies.
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  • Co-designing a Bespoken Wearable Display for People with Dissociative Identity Disorder
  • Patricia Piedade, Nikoletta Matsur, Catarina Rodrigues, et al. 2022. Co-designing a Bespoken Wearable Display for People with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility, ACM.
  • [ABSTRACT] [PDF]

  Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is characterized by the pres- ence of at least two distinct identities in the same individual. This paper describes a co-design process with a person living with DID. We first aimed to uncover the main challenges experienced by the co-designer as well as design opportunities for novel technolo- gies. We then engaged in a prototyping stage to design a wearable display (WhoDID) to facilitate in-person social interactions. The prototype aims to be used as a necklace and enable the user to make their fronting personality visible to others. Thus, facilitating social encounters or sudden changes of identity. We reflect on the design features of WhoDID in the broader context of supporting people with DID. Moreover, we provide insights on co-designing with someone with multiple (sometimes conflicting) personalities regarding requirement elicitation, decision-making, prototyping, and ethics. To our knowledge, we report the first design process with a DID user within the ASSETS and CHI communities. We aim to encourage other assistive technology researchers to design with DID users.