The representation and exploration of ontologies still present significant challenges, particularly intuitiveness and user interface accessibility. Most approaches are based on textual structures and twodimensional visualizations that fail to adequately reflect human cognitive and perceptual mechanisms based on multisensory integration. Multisensory interfaces are designed to improve understanding of concept relationships, reduce cognitive load, and improve information retention. To address this limitation, we propose OMNI (Ontological Multisensory Navigation Interface), an innovative tool that facilitates ontology navigation through a multisensory interface integrating visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli. Since multisensory interaction is still unexplored, OMNI has been conceived as an End-User Development (EUD) tool, allowing non-expert users to customize the ontology exploration. The tool enables the association of multisensory stimuli to semantic attributes without requiring programming skills so that experts in the domain of knowledge represented by the ontology can quickly explore different options. This research represents a preliminary step in a more extensive study to identify the most effective sensory codings for ontology representation.

This study explores the relationship between sensory stimuli and categorical attributes in the context of ontology-based interfaces. Building on theories of embodied cognition and mental models, the research investigates how users spontaneously associate sensory features (visual, auditory, and tactile) with the concept of "popularity" of an item. Through a cross-cultural questionnaire administered to participants in Italy and Spain (N=83), consistent associations were identified. High popularity was linked to highpitched, loud, and dynamic sounds; warm colors and large shapes; and intense, warm, and prolonged tactile stimuli. The findings highlight culturally stable cognitive patterns that can inform the design of multisensory user interfaces. In our research, these outcomes are used to provide help in defining the multisensory interaction with ontological representations in an end-user tool called OMNI (Ontological Multisensory Navigation Interface). These findings contribute to the design of more intuitive and cognitively aligned interfaces with semantic structures, and support a broader application of multisensory design principles in visualization and ontological exploration.

In this article, we have introduced Gamispotify. For the first time, in a social network-based environment, and by benefiting from gamification and crowdsourcing, Gamispotify recommends music to the users based on their personal values. The proposed method has been compared to another published article by conducting two experiments and surveys on 32 application participants. Experimental results indicate that user engagement has significantly increased using the proposed method. Spending time on the application increased by 299.48

The inaugural SENSE-XR workshop investigates how multisensory interfaces, with a special emphasis on haptics and human experience in Extended Reality (XR) across entertainment, education, industry, and healthcare. Framed as a "scientific jam session", the full-day event fuses short talks, hands-on demos, and round-table discussions to spark interdisciplinary collaboration and prototype next-generation immersive experiences.

In this exploratory research, a gamification approach for crowdsourcing fake account detection in social networks has been proposed and evaluated for the first time. Gamification usually tries to satisfy the users' psychological needs. However, motivation could also be based on human physiological needs. Among these needs are health, shelter, and clothes. In the gamification world, we can translate them into monetary or cash rewards. We have investigated the effects of both these rewards on users' motivations in participating and detecting fake accounts by conducting two in-the-wild exploratory experiments and two surveys. The experimental results showed that users prefer physiological rewards over psychological rewards, and an increase in the reward (0.75 euro in this study) resulted in a 365% increase in user participation and a 28.88% decrease in number of accurate reports in the first experiment. Similarly, in the second experiment, we observed that higher monetary rewards resulted in higher user acquisition and higher user engagement, but the quality of the reports was 10% lower than the low monetary rewards. This indicates that physiological rewards can potentially make users over-motivated or, in other words, overgamified. To tackle this problem, we proposed a gamification approach that benefits from both psychological and physiological rewards and gradually increases them. The evaluation results showed a 15% increase in the quality of the reports, a 26% increase in interaction time using the proposed method, and a 19% increase in user acquisition to lower monetary rewards. It also showed a 57% increase in commitment to participating in the survey compared with other groups. Both survey results show that around 40% of the users prefer to receive between 0.50 and 1 euro for their services. Also, women showed more quality responses and commitment in completing the participation than men.

Moving to a responsible engineering educational approach is a trend nowadays since the artifacts created by engineers have an impact on society and the environment. Ethics has become a key learning outcome value by many accreditation bodies, but ethics education can be implemented in many different ways. This paper advocates for an educational approach not only based on the introduction of stand-alone ethics courses but also on pouring values throughout the curriculum in any courses related to creating technologies. We describe here two examples of assignments that follow a microscale embedded ethics approach and active learning tasks to engage students in the exploration of biases and ethical issues concerning user interface design and data visualizations, respectively. The first example has a hidden goal of identifying gender-based biases in websites by applying reverse design thinking techniques on existing websites. The second example uses three different tasks to explore and apply ethics in data integration and visualizations by designing multisensorial visualizations that could serve more diverse audiences, applying value-based design in a final project, and elaborating an essay on existing unethical AI-based tools. Both experiences, which students appreciated, helped to raise awareness of ethical issues and the responsibility of computer science engineers.

Social and ubiquitous computing opens up many opportunities to engage citizens in activities that benefit their communities. Technology is ready and available, but there are still open issues concerning how to engage people in activities that are not extrinsically rewarding or whose impact is not immediately perceived. In this paper, we explore the role that situated motivational affordances can play in encouraging citizens in one of such activities, early warning. With this purpose, we designed and implemented a gamified app, IWarn that was iteratively designed following an action-research process to align the needs and capabilities of two types of stakeholders: emergency managers and citizens. The situated motivational affordances framework was used to lead the evaluation considering the motivational affordances enabled by the app and the situation in which it was used. The IWarn app was evaluated in an in-the-wild deployment where 4 emergency workers and 17 citizens took part in a real exercise for one week. Our results suggest that the gamified elements helped to improve intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and user engagement. This work contributes to the social computing domain by illustrating a use case where carefully designed gamification can help in engaging citizens in participatory processes

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This paper briefly overviews the elements that affect user trust, security, and privacy in social media applications. We analyzed how gamification, personalization, decentralization, design, content, transparency, demography, and performance can affect user trust, privacy, and security in social media. Then, we reviewed common approaches hackers use to attack users on social media platforms. Approaches like phishing, social engineering, credential stuffing, malware distributions, fake profiles, catfishing, man-in-the-middle, session hijacking, and cross-site scripting (XSS) were reviewed. Then, we share our experiences facing this type of threat in the Gegli social network and describe how we have tackled these problems. This paper can help social media and other software applications or website developers that benefit from social networking features to familiarize themselves with the common security threats and the approaches that can be used to tackle them.

Integrating citizens into Emergency Management can make the process more efficient and communities more resilient. The rise of mobile and social computing has paved the way to ideate participatory platforms that can be accessed everywhere to facilitate collaboration and cooperation. However, it is a design challenge to balance the needs of the authorities, who are responsible for managing the crisis, with the capabilities of citizens, a challenge that depends also on many organizational and cultural issues. In this paper we summarize the experience of more than one decade of work in envisioning technologies to integrate citizens in the Emergency Management process, technologies that aim at respecting the needs and expectations of the involved agencies whilst taking profit from the valuable social capital of individuals and communities. Drawing on the outcomes of several projects, we examine the contribution of coproduction to exploit social capital, the value of participatory and action research approaches to understand better the needs of different stakeholders, and the role of gamification and emotional affordances to enhance civic engagement.

One of the important problems that society is facing today is online hostility. This article describes our gamified approach to educating social network users about moral values to prevent online hostility. We have proposed a personalized gamification method using the social network members’ personality traits to develop an effective game-based learning approach. The implementation of this method, in addition to the theoretical framework of this study, is described in this work-in-progress article.

We explore potentials and limitations of visual programming environments to prototype Tangible Virtual Reality interactive behaviors, a technically complex task that requires the integration of real-time tracking hardware as well as software to program what happens in the virtual world given the position and orientation of physical objects. We created a plugin and an ad-hoc library to ease the integration of tracking hardware in the Unreal Blueprints visual environment and facilitated a one-day contextual inquiry workshop with six designers and researchers (with textual programming expertise) programming interactive behaviors using our library. Observations and contextual interviews with participants involved in two design activities uncovered areas of development for future visual end-user tools: provide different layers of abstraction, embrace liveness, foster in situ immersive programming and enable the use of interactive machine learning to program behaviors via users’ physical demonstration.

Well-designed educational Augmented Reality (AR) experiences support collaboration, transferability to the real world, situated, and experiential learning. Nevertheless, envisioning engaging yet effective learning and teaching experiences is a challenge. Most teachers are not technologically ready to create AR experiences and rely upon closed products often regarded as fun activities but whose learning affordances might remain unnoticed and whose integration within the course activities is often shoehorned. End-User Development tools empowering not technical users like teachers to create their own AR experience could contribute to spread the use of this technology in educational settings. In this paper, we analyze whether a EUD AR tool based on mobile technology can have positive effects on the educational experience from a teaching and learning perspective. We performed qualitative and quantitative research in a high school analyzing the tool in a focus group with teachers and assessing its effects on the educational experience by using it in two real classes. Results show that even if using the tool implies an additional workload for teachers, results can be rewarding for both, teachers and students that are skilled enough to use AR as far as it is based on easy, familiar, and affordable devices like mobile devices.

Given the extensive use of Augmented Reality (AR) for learning and training in different domains, this technology could support traditional therapies for people with dementia. However, to devise useful experiences, it is crucial to involve specialists and patients to fully understand the potential and limitations of ad-hoc AR applications considering the patients’ medical conditions as well as their expectations about the technology. In the context of a project aimed at improving healthcare service centers, following an action research approach, we codesigned two AR applications, tablet- and glass-based, to practice specific cognitive competencies (memory, recognition, and association) involving two specialists in psychiatry and two patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. In an initial phase, we identified key issues about how the patients interact with the two devices and the interfaces in the doctors’ room that helped to improve the final prototypes. These prototypes were tested in a clinical study with ten patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment in the presence of their therapist.

The use of different locomotion techniques such as walking or teleportation affects the way people explore and build an understanding of complex data in immersive visualizations. We report results from a quantitative user study (14 participants) comparing the effect of room-scale real walking versus teleportation on information search and task performance in a word-cloud immersive visualization. Participants performed an ordering task and we measured performance, post-task recall, workload and flow. Results suggest that room-scale real walking favors interaction and short-term recall but could imply higher workload.

User engagement elements are important aspects of any software application. The presence or absence of these elements can have different levels of impact on applications’ success or failure. However, to the best of our knowledge, the presence or absence of these elements in successful and unsuccessful software applications has not yet been analyzed to help software engineers understand the impact each of these elements can have on applications. To fill this gap, in this paper, based on the reviewed literature, we have categorized the user engagement elements into eight main elements and evaluated them against 50 successful and unsuccessful software applications. Evaluation results indicate that utility, interactivity, and design quality have been highly used in successful software applications, while gamification, personalization, and social networking have been almost absent in unsuccessful applications. We have discussed the implications of these findings and given some recommendations for improving user engagement in software applications.

The concept of Playable City situates games in public spaces to create connections between the citizens and the urban environment. To this end, Augmented Reality (AR) and pervasive technologies can provide additional information about urban objects or places and support innovative and engaging experiences to increase the user interest in the surrounding area. Understanding how these experiences affect the user interest is crucial for reaching a well-established connection between the people and the spaces around them. Our contribution is a preliminary framework to evaluate how being engaged in a playful activity improves interest and awareness in a specific urban area. The framework is based on the situated motivational affordances to establish a correlation among the users’ motivations, the situation, and the employed technological artifact. We use an AR pervasive game to evaluate a playful historical experience as a technology probe. The results suggest that while playing the game, the citizens started to show a growing interest in the historical facts around them. At the same time, they began to raise concerns about other issues like sustainability, socio-environmental, and socioeconomic development.

Early warning is the activity of the mitigation phase concerned with monitoring precursors of a potential hazard to decide whether it is evolving to real risk and eventually initiate an early response. The first step consists of collecting updated and reliable data to support situational awareness from emergency operators. Data-centered Early Warning Systems (EWS) are focused on gathering data and run simulations to support decision-makers. A more sustainable approach consists of a people-centered EWS that takes profit from citizens who act as intelligent sensors collecting and sharing purposeful information. This people-centered approach can contribute to raising community awareness of the local environment and its vulnerabilities. In this paper, we introduce iWarn, a system relying upon mobile computing and gamification to integrate citizens in this process. The system has been developed following an action research approach to involve different stakeholders, including professionals, volunteers, and citizens.