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Video games are an established medium that provides interactive entertainment beyond pure enjoyment in many contexts. Game designers create dedicated tutorials to teach players the game mechanisms and rules, such as the conventions for interaction, control schemes, core game mechanics, etc. While effective tutorial design is considered a crucial aspect to support this learning process, the existing literature approaches focus on designing ad hoc tutorials for specific game genres rather than investigating the impact of different tutorial styles on game learnability and player engagement. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by presenting a general-purpose approach aimed at supporting game designers in the identification of the most suitable tutorial style for a specific genre of video games. The approach is evaluated in the context of a simple first-person shooter (FPS) mainstream video game built by the authors through a controlled comparative user experiment involving 46 players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents ARCA, a software system that enables semantic search and exploration over a book catalog. The main purpose of this work is twofold: to propose a general paradigm for a semantic enrichment workflow and to evaluate a visual approach to information retrieval based on extracted information and existing knowledge graphs. ARCA has been designed and implemented following a user-centered design approach. Two different releases of the system have incrementally and iteratively developed and evaluated. The first release has evaluated the quality and usefulness of the extracted data. The second release, whose design was a refinement based on the previous evaluation results, was assessed by several users. Moreover, a comparative test with other information retrieval systems was conducted in order to study the potential added-value of the system. ARCA is employed in a real editorial scenario to visually search and explore the books of a publishing house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in digital communication. It is a type of cyber attack often successful because users are not aware of their vulnerabilities or are unable to understand the risks. This article presents a systematic literature review conducted to draw a “big picture” of the most important research works performed on human factors and phishing. The analysis of the retrieved publications, framed along the research questions addressed in the systematic literature review, helps in understanding how human factors should be considered to defend against phishing attacks. Future research directions are also highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arising of new technologies ranging from smartphones to social networks is constantly increasing interactions between people. In the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) community, adapting technology to human nature is the key concern of User-Centered Design (UCD). However, UCD tends to neglect the emerging social dimension of technology: users are consulted in the design process, but they do not have any direct involvement or creative control over the developed technological solutions. On the other hand, the collaborative and social nature of the design process is getting increasingly explicit in the Product Design community, where well-established participatory approaches are applied to involve stakeholders, designers, and end-users in the creative process of new products. In this paper, we first provide a deep analysis of the state of the art of participatory approaches in the research literature. Then, we investigate how their integration with UCD leads not only to empower the role of end-users as active collaborators of designers towards a more democratic crowd-based UCD process, but also to create innovation in the design process. We advocate that such innovation can be obtained by giving the right voice not only to the users who reach consensus in the design process but also to the marginals. We provide an explorative model, some experiments, and a sketch of the user interface to support our claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to operate in human-populated environments, robots need to show reasonable behaviors and human-compatible abilities. In the so-called Symbiotic Autonomy, robots and humans help each other to overcome mutual limitations and complete their tasks. When the robot takes the initiative and asks the human for help, there is a change of perspective in the interaction, which has not yet been specifically addressed by HRI studies. In this paper, we investigate the novel scenario brought about by Symbiotic Autonomy, by addressing the factors that may influence the interaction. In particular, we introduce the "Collaboration Attitude" to evaluate how the response of users being asked by the robot for help is influenced by the context of the interaction and by what they are doing (i.e., ongoing activity). We present the results of a first study, which confirms the influence of conventional factors (i.e., proxemics) on the Collaboration Attitude, while it suggests that the context (i.e., relaxing vs. working) may not be much relevant. Then, we present a second study, carried out to better assess the influence of the activity performed by the humans in our population, when (s)he is approached by the robot, as an additional and more compelling characterization of context (i.e., standing vs. sitting). While the experimental scenario takes into account a population with distinctive characteristics (i.e., academic staff and students), the overall findings of our studies suggest that the attitude of users towards robots in the setting of Symbiotic Autonomy is influenced by factors already known to influence robot acceptance while it is not significantly affected by the context of the interaction and by the human ongoing activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In current electronic environments, the ever-increasing amount of personal information, means that users focus more on managing their information rather than using it to accomplish their objectives. To overcome this problem, a user task-based interactive environment is needed to help users focus on tasks they wish to perform rather than spending more time on managing their personal information. In this paper, we present parts of our on-going work on task-based user-system interaction, which highlights the need for a shift from an information-centric to a task-centric environment. More precisely, we look into issues relating to modeling user tasks that arise when users interact with the environment to fulfill their goals through these sets of tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present Esteem (Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents), a community-based P2P platform for supporting semantic collaboration among a set of independent peers, without prior reciprocal knowledge and no predefined relationships. Goal of Esteem is to go beyond the existing state-of-the-art solutions for P2P knowledge sharing and to provide an integrated platform for both data and service discovery. A distinguishing feature of Esteem is the use of semantic communities to explicitly give shape to the collective knowledge and expertise of peer groups with similar interests. Key techniques of Esteem will be presented in the paper and concern: shuffling-based communication, ontology and service matchmaking, context management, and quality-aware data integration. An application example of data and service discovery in the health-care domain will be presented, by also discussing results of system and user evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports a unified methodology developed to evaluate the accessibility and usability of mobile computing applications, which is intended to guarantee universal access as far as possible. As a basis for the methodology, this paper presents an analysis of the accessibility guidelines, conducted to take into account the specificity of mobile systems, as well as a set of usability heuristics, specifically devised for mobile computing. Finally, it presents the results of the application of the proposed methodology to applications that have been semi-automatically developed by the MAIS Designer, a new design tool that provides applications suited to different mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present global society, information has to be exchangeable in open and dynamic environments, where interacting users do not necessarily share a common understanding of the world at hand. This is particularly true in P2P scenarios, where millions of autonomous users (peers) need to cooperate by sharing their resources (such as data and services). We propose the Esteem approach (Emergent Semantics and cooperaTion in multi-knowledgE EnvironMents), where a comprehensive framework and a platform for data and service discovery in P2P systems are proposed, with advanced solutions for trust and quality-based data management, P2P infrastructure definition, query processing and dynamic service discovery in a context-aware scenario. In Esteem, semantic communities are built around declared interests in the form of manifesto ontologies and their autonomous nature is preserved by allowing a shared semantics to naturally emerge from the peer interactions. Inside the borders of semantic communities data and services are discovered, queried and invoked in a resource sharing scenario, where the context in which users interoperate and the trust of exchanged information are also relevant aspects to take into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]