Paolo Massa | Bruno Kessler Foundation (original) (raw)

Papers by Paolo Massa

Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering

Interaction Design and Children

The COVID-19 emergency has posed many challenges to the worldwide school system leading to school... more The COVID-19 emergency has posed many challenges to the worldwide school system leading to school closures and massive adoption of distance education. These events affected not only the way education is delivered but also the overall school community's wellbeing and cohesion. In this paper, we present a playful education platform originally designed to promote sustainable mobility in schools that has been adapted to support distance learning and community engagement during the health emergency. In the original version of the platform, the home-school distances traveled by students with sustainable means contributed to the advancement of the whole class in a collective virtual trip associated with playful learning material. Conversely, in a revised version of the platform adapted to the new context, students could advance in the virtual trip by reporting the good deeds performed at home. Findings from 161 questionnaires completed by teachers, families, and students, as well as results from online workshops with students, and the analysis of log files at the end of the school year revealed the opportunities and limitations of converting a playful activity conceived for being experienced in class into an online activity to be completed at home. The results show that the adapted version contributed to the school community cohesion and provided a positive experience to all its members, even though it was not able to completely overcome the generalized feeling of isolation. This paper contributes to understanding the social value of collaborative and playful digital activities that involve the entire school community, showing how technology can impact education and support communities in times of crisis. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing systems and tools. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.

Given that little is known about regional language user interaction practices on Wikipedia, this ... more Given that little is known about regional language user interaction practices on Wikipedia, this study analyzed content creation process, user social interaction and exchanged content over the course of the existence of Venetian Wikipedia. Content of and user interactions over time on Venetian Wikipedia exhibit practices shared within larger Wikipedia communities and display behaviors that are pertinent to this specific community. Shared practices with other Wikipedias (eg. English Wikipedia) included coordination content as a dominant category of exchanged content, user-role based structure where and most active communicators are administrators was another shared feature, as well as socialization tactics to involve users in online projects. While Venetian Wikipedia stood out for its geographically-linked users who emphasized their regional identity. User exchanges over time spilled over from online to offline domains. This analysis provides a different side of Wikipedia collaboration which is based on creation, maintenance, and negotiation of the content but also shows engagement into interpersonal communication. Thus, this study exemplifies how regional language Wikipedias provide ways to their users not only to preserve their cultural heritage through the language use on regional language Wikipedia space and connect through shared contents of interest, but also, how it could serve as a community maintenance platform that unifies users with shared goals and extends communication to offline realm.

Recommender Systems (RS) suggests to users items they will like based on their past opinions. Col... more Recommender Systems (RS) suggests to users items they will like based on their past opinions. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is the most used technique to assess user similarity between users but very often the sparseness of user profiles prevents the computation. Moreover CF doesn't take into account the reliability of the other users. In this paper we present a real world application, namely moleskiing.it, in which both of these conditions are critic to deliver personalized recommendations. A blog oriented architecture collects user experiences on ski mountaineering and their opinions on other users. Exploitation of Trust Metrics allows to present only relevant and reliable information according to the user's personal point of view of other authors trustworthiness. Differently from the notion of authority, we claim that trustworthiness is a user centered notion that requires the computation of personalized metrics. We also present an open information exchange architecture that makes use of Semantic Web formats to guarantee interoperability between ski mountaineering communities.

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We introduce an application combining CBR and collaborative filtering techniques in the music dom... more We introduce an application combining CBR and collaborative filtering techniques in the music domain. We describe a scenario in which the classical collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm su ers from serious drawbacks: this scenario stresses the difference between a single-interaction case and a dynamically growing user profile. We set up a framework meant to extend collaborative filtering for compositional recommendation systems where cases does not explicitly yield the amount of overlapping items needed by classical filtering.

Proceedings of the extended abstracts of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '14, 2014

ABSTRACT

Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration - WikiSym '12, 2012

ABSTRACT In this short paper, we present WikiTrip, a web tool we created and released as open sou... more ABSTRACT In this short paper, we present WikiTrip, a web tool we created and released as open source which provides a visualization over time of two kinds of information about the Wikipedians who edited a selected page: their location in the world and their gender. We also describe evidence that pages on a language edition of Wikipedia which receive most attention in terms of edits from countries where the language is not primarily spoken are about TV shows and stars, football teams or specific geographic locations.

Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Fun, Fast, Foundational - NordiCHI '14, 2014

ICST Transactions on Ambient Systems, 2014

Ubiquitous games and gamification have recently become a widely applied approach for promoting we... more Ubiquitous games and gamification have recently become a widely applied approach for promoting well-being and improving health behaviours such as a physically active lifestyle. In this Special Issue of the Journal ICST Transactions on Ambient Systems, we collected a selection of high-quality papers presented at the workshop on "Ubiquitous games and gamification for promoting behaviour change and wellbeing", held at the 2013 CHItaly Conference. The articles explore different areas where ubiquitous games and gamification can influence the attitudes, health and behaviours of people towards well-being, from the management of diseases to eco-sustainable mobility, from serious moral games to the monitoring of burnout levels and the well-being of small groups during social occasions such as museum visits.

2009 Eighth IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, 2009

Abstract In this paper we analyze the community of a social network site, Advogato. The peculiar ... more Abstract In this paper we analyze the community of a social network site, Advogato. The peculiar characteristics of Advogato is that users can explicitly express weighted trust relationships among themselves. We conduct a longitudinal analysis of the trust network over a time period of 4 years, exploring the community as it grew from a knit circle of 300 users to an society of almost 6500 individuals. We report the changes over time of standard indexes in social network analysis such as clustering and degrees of separation. We then ...

Memory Studies, 2014

Collective memory processes have been studied from many different perspectives. For example, whil... more Collective memory processes have been studied from many different perspectives. For example, while psychology has investigated collaborative recall in small groups, other research traditions have focused on flashbulb memories or on the cultural processes involved in the formation of collective memories of entire nations. In this article, considering the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a global memory place, we analyze online commemoration patterns of traumatic events. We extracted 88 articles and talk pages related to traumatic events, and using logistic regression, we analyzed their edit activity comparing it with more than 370,000 other Wikipedia pages. Results show that the relative amount of edits during anniversaries can significantly distinguish between pages related to traumatic events and other pages. The logistic regression results, together with the transcription of a group of messages exchanged by the users during the anniversaries of the September 11 attacks and the Vir...

2009 Eighth IEEE International …, Dec 12, 2009

In this paper we analyze the community of a social network site, Advogato. The peculiar character... more In this paper we analyze the community of a social network site, Advogato. The peculiar characteristics of Advogato is that users can explicitly express weighted trust relationships among themselves. We conduct a longitudinal analysis of the trust network over a time period of 4 years, exploring the community as it grew from a knit circle of 300 users to an society of almost 6500 individuals. We report the changes over time of standard indexes in social network analysis such as clustering and degrees of separation. We then ...

International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST), 2012

While the overall amount of user contributions in various namespaces has been discussed in previo... more While the overall amount of user contributions in various namespaces has been discussed in previous research, the question of how and where users contribute, depending on their time spent in Wikipedia, is still open. This study analyzed contribution patterns in three namespaces of 685,897 active users of English Wikipedia since its inception. User editing behaviors were analyzed according to the amount of time spent within Wikipedia where contributions in content-oriented spaces were compared with social-oriented ...

The 4 million articles of the English Wikipedia have been written in a collaborative fashion by m... more The 4 million articles of the English Wikipedia have been written in a collaborative fashion by more than 16 million volunteer editors. On each article, the community of editors strive to reach a neutral point of view, representing all significant views fairly, proportionately, and without biases. However, beside the English one, there are more than 280 editions of Wikipedia in different languages and their relatively isolated communities of editors are not forced by the platform to discuss and negotiate their points ...

Www, 2005

The blogosphere refers to the distributed network of user opinions published on the WWW. Whereas ... more The blogosphere refers to the distributed network of user opinions published on the WWW. Whereas centralized review sites such Amazon.com previously allowed users to post opinions on goods such as books and CDs, blogging software allows users to publish opinions on any topic without constraints on predefined schema. However, centralized review sites such as Amazon.com have one significant advantage: reviews pertaining to a single topic are collected together in one place, allowing readers to peruse a diverse range of opinions quickly. In this paper we examine how such a topiccentric view of the Blogosphere can be created. We characterise the problems in aligning similar concepts created by a set of distributed, autonomous users and describe current initiatives to solve the problem. Finally, we introduce the Tagsocratic project, a novel initiative to solve the concept alignment problem using techniques derived from research in language acquisition among distributed, autonomous agents. Amazons view category Id: 123 title: The Novel reviews: User A: not as good as.. User B: a wonderful book.. User C: it reminds me of ..

This PhD thesis addresses the following problem: exploiting of trust information in order to enha... more This PhD thesis addresses the following problem: exploiting of trust information in order to enhance the accuracy and the user acceptance of current Recommender Systems (RS). RSs suggest to users items they will probably like. Up to now, current RSs mainly generate recommendations based on users' opinions on items. Nowadays, with the growth of online communities, emarketplaces, weblogs and peer-to-peer networks, a new kind of information is available: rating expressed by an user on another user (trust). We analyze current RS weaknesses and show how use of trust can overcome them. We proposed a solution about exploiting of trust into RSs and underline what experiments we will run in order to test our solution.