Comunicacions a congressos (Enginyeria Informàtica i Disseny Digital)
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
- ItemOpen AccessAlexa, Tell Me a Joke!: "Voice Interfaces are Truly Inclusive"(ACM, 2022-04-28) Sin, Jaisie; Munteanu, Cosmin; Waycott, Jenny; Brewer, Robin N.; Sayago Barrantes, Sergio; Lazar, Amanda; Weber, AstridSpeech and voice interaction is often hailed as a natural form of interaction and thus more inclusive for a larger portion of users. But, how accurate is this claim? In this panel, we challenge existing assumptions that voice and speech interaction is inclusive of diverse users. The goal of this panel is to bring together the broad HCI community to discuss the state of voice interaction for marginalized and vulnerable populations, how inclusive design is considered (or neglected) in current voice interaction design practice, and how to move forward when it comes to designing voice interaction for inclusion and diversity. In particular, we plan to center the discussion on older adults as a representative group of digitally-marginalized populations, especially given that voice interfaces are marketed towards this group, yet often fail to properly include this population in the design of such interfaces.
- ItemOpen AccessChallenges and opportunities of leveraging intelligent conversational assistant to improve the well-being of older adults(ACM, 2020-04-25) Sengupta, Korok; Sarcar, Sayan; Pradhan, Alisha; McNaney, Roisin; Sayago Barrantes, Sergio; Chattopadhyay, Debaleena; Joshi, AnirudhaRecent advancements and economic feasibility have led to the widespread adoption of conversational digital assistants for everyday work. While research has focused on the use of these conversational assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa, by young adults and families, very little work focuses on the acceptance and adaptability amongst the older adults. This SIG aims to discuss the use and benefits of these conversational digital assistants for the well being of older adults. The goals for this SIG are to: (i) explore the acceptance/adoption of voice-based conversational agents for older adults. (ii) explore anthropomorphism in the design of conversational digital assistants. (iii) understand triggers (scenarios of use) that can initiate the process of reminiscence thus leading to meaningful conversation. (iv) explore conversational User Experience. (v) explore the co-existence of non-conversational use cases.
- ItemOpen AccessVoice Assistants as Learning Companions: An Initial Exploration with Computer Science Students(ACM, 2020-05-10) Sayago Barrantes, SergioWith the hands-free and mobile interaction capabilities, and conversational potential, Voice Assistants (VA) like Apple Siri and Google Assistant can become ubiquitous learning companions that students wear in their pockets. Yet, studies addressing the potential and challenges of using VA in education are scant in Human-Computer Interaction. To begin filling this gap, this paper is an initial, qualitative exploration of how smartphone-based VA like Apple Siri and Google Assistant play the role of learning companions of Computer Science (CS) students. Without having been designed for this purpose, there is room for thinking that neither Apple Siri nor Google Assistant can play this role. Yet, the results of a participant observational study conducted over a semester in two modules, show that Apple Siri played the role of a convenient and motivating collaborator, who also clashed with, and changed, students’ perceived use of VA. Open-ended questions prompted by this study are raised.
- ItemOpen AccessUrban ageing: Technology, agency and community in smarter cities for older people(ACM, 2015-06-27) Righi, Valeria; Sayago Barrantes, Sergio; Blat, JosepDespite the widespread popularity of smart cities in policy and research fields, and the ever-increasing ageing population in urban areas, ageing issues have seldom been addressed in depth in smart city programs. The main focus has hitherto been on making physical environments 'older people friendly'. We review studies in environmental gerontology, policies and HCI that show the multifaceted relationship between ageing and cities. We discuss two case studies with scenarios of engagement of older people in urban areas we undertook in the past 4 years. By drawing upon the results, we propose a vision of smart city that conceives of older people as embedded in intergenerational urban communities and capable of creating new engagement situations by reconfiguring IT-driven scenarios to their interests and social practices. This paper aims at expanding the current visions of smart cities for older people by building along three main dimensions: technology, agency and community.
- ItemOpen AccessApproximate and Optimal Solutions for the Bipartite Polarization Problem(IOS Press, 2022-10-17) Alsinet, Teresa; Argelich, Josep; Béjar Torres, Ramón; Martínez Rodríguez, SantiIn a recent work we introduced a problem about finding the highest polarized bipartition on a weighted and labeled graph that represents a debate developed trough some social network, where nodes represent user’s opinions and edges agreement or disagreement between users. Finding this target bipartition is an optimization problem that can be seen as a generalization of the maxcut problem, so we first introduced a basic local search algorithm to find approximate solutions of the problem. In this paper we go one step further, and we present an exact algorithm for finding the optimal solution, based on an integer programming formulation, and compare the performance of a new variant of our local search algorithm with the exact algorithm. Our results show that at least on real instances of the problem, obtained from Reddit debates, the approximate solutions obtained are almost always identical to the optimal solutions.