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Process Mining is a family of techniques for analyzing business process execution data recorded in event logs. Process models can be obtained as output of automated process discovery techniques or can be used as input of techniques for conformance checking or model enhancement. In Declarative Process Mining, process models are represented as sets of temporal constraints (instead of procedural descriptions where all control-flow details are explicitly modeled). An open research direction in Declarative Process Mining is whether multi-perspective specifications can be supported, i.e., specifications that not only describe the process behavior from the control-flow point of view, but also from other perspectives like data or time. In this article, we address this question by considering SAT (Propositional Satisfiability Problem) as a solving technology for a number of classical problems in Declarative Process Mining, namely, log generation, conformance checking, and temporal query checking. To do so, we first express each problem as a suitable FO (First-Order) theory whose bounded models represent solutions to the problem, and then find a bounded model of such theory by compilation into SAT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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 computing continuum enables new opportunities for managing big data pipelines concerning efficient management of heterogeneous and untrustworthy resources. We discuss the big data pipelines lifecycle on the computing continuum and its associated challenges, and we outline a future research agenda in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As social robots become more prominent in our lives, their interaction with humans takes an increasing role, and new collaborative scenarios emerge. This development brings the need to realize robust test methods enabling the design and evaluation of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) teaming tasks to prove functionality and promote adoption. In this article, we present a general-purpose and repeatable methodology for conducting studies in collaborative HRI in the range of robotic competitions. The methodology includes a step-by-step approach to design HRI teaming tasks tailored to be enacted in a robotic competition and to evaluate the performance of social robots to execute the designed tasks, exploring the relationship between robots' performance and user perceptions based on the feedback of the users participating to such tasks. We assess the feasibility of the methodology to design and evaluate an HRI teaming task in the context of "Smart CIties RObotics Challenges" (SciRoc) competition, which targets at investigating the impact of social of robots in smart cities. [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]

Process mining allows analysts to exploit logs of historical executions of business processes to extract insights regarding the actual performance of these processes. One of the most widely studied process mining operations is automated process discovery. An automated process discovery method takes as input an event log, and produces as output a business process model that captures the control-flow relations between tasks that are observed in or implied by the event log. Various automated process discovery methods have been proposed in the past two decades, striking different tradeoffs between scalability, accuracy, and complexity of the resulting models. However, these methods have been evaluated in an ad-hoc manner, employing different datasets, experimental setups, evaluation measures, and baselines, often leading to incomparable conclusions and sometimes unreproducible results due to the use of closed datasets. This article provides a systematic review and comparative evaluation of automated process discovery methods, using an open-source benchmark and covering 12 publicly-available real-life event logs, 12 proprietary real-life event logs, and nine quality metrics. The results highlight gaps and unexplored tradeoffs in the field, including the lack of scalability of some methods and a strong divergence in their performance with respect to the different quality metrics used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) refer to a new generation of business processes enacted in many application environments (e.g., emergency management, smart manufacturing, etc.), in which the presence of Internet-of-Things devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) strongly influences the coordination of the real-world entities (e.g., humans, robots, etc.) inhabitating such environments. A Process Management System (PMS) employed for executing CPPs is required to automatically adapt its running processes to anomalous situations and exogenous events by minimising any human intervention. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing an approach and an adaptive Cognitive PMS, called SmartPM, which combines process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection and automated resolution strategies leveraging on three well-established action-based formalisms developed for reasoning about actions in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including the situation calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning. Interestingly, the use of SmartPM does not require any expertise of the internal working of the AI tools involved in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In complex emergency scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations must collaborate. These teams include both first responders, such as police and fire departments, and those operators who coordinate the effort from operational centers. The Workpad architecture consists of a front- and a back-end layer. The front-end layer is composed of several front-end teams of first responders, and the back-end layer is an integrated peer-to-peer network that lets front-end teams collaborate through information exchange and coordination. Team members at the front end carry PDAs, with team leaders' PDAs equipped with gateway communication technologies that let them communicate with the back-end centers. INSET: Emergency Management in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]