Biagio Lenzitti | Università degli Studi di Palermo (original) (raw)
Papers by Biagio Lenzitti
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies, 2018
Health empowerment can be obtained through an informative and educational intervention to increas... more Health empowerment can be obtained through an informative and educational intervention to increase one's ability to think critically and act autonomously. Medical texts are usually written by professionals and can be difficulty understood by non experts who do not have the same skills and vocabularies. Thus, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary-thesaurusdictionary that can help a non expert to easily find the consumer equivalent of medical (technical) terms and additional consumer information. To this end, we have developed an online multilingual medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary by interconnecting different online sources, i.e., medical vocabularies to create a list of technical terms, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) for translating technical terms into their consumer equivalents and consumer dictionaries for finding explanations of the terms. In addition, we have built an online editor that allows to add new medical terms (with the related consumer information) and modify existing consumer terms and definitions. Furthermore, we have built some practical applications, on top of the medical vocabularythesaurus-dictionary, in order to facilitate the empowerment of patients, or non-experts in general. The applications are located at the data, information and knowledge levels of the 'knowledge pyramid' that, in our case, contains the empowerment at the top level. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems → Data management systems • Information systems → Information systems applications → Collaborative and social computing systems and tools • Applied computing → Life and medical sciences → Health informatics • Applied computing → Education → E-learning
The main tools used to find digital contents in the Web are search engines and directories but th... more The main tools used to find digital contents in the Web are search engines and directories but they are not presently able to understand the user specific needs and starting knowledge. This work presents "U-Search" a new meta engine that allows to create knowledge paths on the Web based on specific user requirements and knowledge levels. To this end, we consider different searcher categories such as a "basic searcher" who knows little about a topic and will look for more information, a "deep searcher" who will look for specific details on a topic that he/she already knows and a "wide searcher" who will look for expanding his/her knowledge domain with topics that are loosely related to the starting topic. The meta engine will suggest words and web pages correlated to each of those searcher categories thus creating new knowledge paths tailored to the real user needs.
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health
A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a "human-to-machine"... more A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a "human-to-machine" communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her empowerment level and the "human-to-human" communication process that occurs between a patient and a healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at the syntactic-technical level, the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the "right" amount of Web content in a language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals. 1 INTRODUCTION According to the World Health Organization (WHO), empowerment is "a process through which people gain greater control over decisions and actions affecting their health" (WHO, 1998). It includes, as a basic step, the acquisition of health/medical information that helps patients/citizens to understand medical conditions and treatments, acquire selfconfidence to discuss them with medical professionals and, together, make the best-informed decisions (Akerkar & Bichile, 2004; Smith, 2004). The main source of health/medical information is, nowadays, the World Wide Web (or Web, for short) with the number of Web health information seekers that have been steadily increasing over the years (Pew Research Center, 2013; Taylor, 2010). Search engines are more and more used as the main tools to provide Web information. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and overload them with the amount of information. The use of a search engine for Web information retrieval entails a human-to-machine communication process between the user (e.g., a patient) and the search engine. It affects, among others, the amount, comprehension and use of the found information. This, in turn, may facilitate or complicate the humanto-human communication process between patients and healthcare professionals such as doctors (Smith, 2004). Communication processes have been modelled in various ways in the past decades. One of the most famous communication model is the one introduced by Morris in relation to its theory of signs (Morris, 1938). It is made up of three levels, i.e., syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. It is paired up by another communication model introduced by Shannon and Weaver (Shannon, 1949) that tackles the problems of communication at the technical, semantic and effectiveness levels. The connection of the two
Web information on different disciplines (mainly technical ones) is mainly created by the differe... more Web information on different disciplines (mainly technical ones) is mainly created by the different experts (engineers, scientists, physicians, lawyers, etc.) who use their own 'technical' language. On the other hand, this information is often read by general users who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts and have difficulties to understand and learn it. In order to allow e-learners to use any document available on the web and understand it, it is desirable to have a system that takes a text written with technical terms and automatically translates it in a plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language. In this work we present the methodology and implementation detalis of such a system and describe the prototype we have developed for the health/medical field.
This paper describes the LOD.CS.UNI.PA Project and its main goal, the transformation process of d... more This paper describes the LOD.CS.UNI.PA Project and its main goal, the transformation process of data already available on the web site of the Computer Science curricula web site at the University of Palermo into data ready to be connected to the LOD. Since 1997 information about bachelor and master degrees in Computer Science at the University of Palermo has been published on the web, and provides a reference point for students, teachers and researchers who have easy access to the information they require. However, the users of the web are now changing; data cannot be published only for human comprehension but intelligent devices also need access to web data and above all they need to understand them. In 2006 Tim Berners Lee presented a star rating system for the data available on the web. Following his five star classification, the aim of the work described in this paper is to raise the level of data concerning degrees in Computer Science at Palermo University, from one star (data ...
Complete learning in science and engineering requires a mixture of theoretical and practical sess... more Complete learning in science and engineering requires a mixture of theoretical and practical sessions carried out in specific labs. Some issues, such as the reduced accessibility to labs and the expensiveness and fragility of instruments, prevent the fully utilization of those labs. To overcome these problems, a virtual laboratory can be used. A virtual lab (or V-Lab) allows full availability of the labs and its instruments but avoids the physical interaction between the students and the lab apparatuses. Two virtual labs have been recently activated within the Computer Science curriculum at the University of Palermo. They belong to the “Computer Networks” and “Operating Systems” courses. In this work, we will present the architecture and implementation details of those labs. In particular, the labs allow students to perform some exercises (router configuration for Computer Networks and visualization of OS details for Operating Systems) made of several steps where the student has to ...
2019 29th Annual Conference of the European Association for Education in Electrical and Information Engineering (EAEEIE), 2019
In this paper, we present a framework named SIRENE, a Web-based visual programming environment, w... more In this paper, we present a framework named SIRENE, a Web-based visual programming environment, where teachers and students can collaboratively interact, using a flexible and versatile definition of visual programming code instead of pre-established rules. After the description of the architecture of the SIRENE framework, the preliminary results of a pilot trial with secondary school students will be presented; these results will lead to the final remarks and directions for further developments.
Coding or programming is very important for a number of tasks and this is true not only in proble... more Coding or programming is very important for a number of tasks and this is true not only in problem solving but also in the computer science and over. Many skills have to be acquired before to have a high familiarity degree with this science. In the studies for methods of coding, students have a great problem for understanding on how to solve and to develop algorithms in a rational way, thus the expertise on how to solve and to develop algorithms is the most difficult to acquire for all students in whatever age. This paper introduces the prototype of a framework able to run in the web space and to be supported by different devices and browsers, useful to integrate a number of collaborative contexts for teaching and learning in a workroom, which can be hosted in different academic sites. This framework uses a set of visual objects to define the own program, and to understand how to solve and develop the owner algorithms, and it is in accordance to a blended approach in which students ...
More and more people use Internet to look for medical information for understanding and learning ... more More and more people use Internet to look for medical information for understanding and learning but different users, such as experts (e.g., physicians) and consumers (e.g., patients), have different needs and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge. Generic and specific search engines and specialized health sites either do not exploit the whole web or overload users with information of different nature. On the contrary, it is important for a user to immediately find the information on the topic being explored that has the 'right' amount of information and level of complexity. This paper presents a meta search engine of medical information on the web, U-MedSearch, that, for any keyword(s) provides four different lists of terms, and in turn web pages, on the basis of the used language (consumer or expert) and correlation degree (strong or loose) with the keyword(s) thus facilitating the search and learning paths of the different types of learners.
Communication and Cognition. Monographies, 2006
The search of a specific topic in Internet provides a lot of information and much of this informa... more The search of a specific topic in Internet provides a lot of information and much of this information has a didactic structure. However, the found "learning objects" cannot easily be reused for the creation of a new didactic work because they are usually proposed without information on their aims and the typology of users which they are destined to. Moreover, the contents are not clearly synthesized so that the reading of the whole object is often necessary to identify them. The use of Internet for the creation of a new didactic work often means just a recompilation of already existing objects using the "cut&paste" widespread practice. As a consequence, the information about the same topic is multiplied and the net is mainly used as a deposit. The action of the collective intelligence is thus only limited to archive querying and not to a real cooperation among users. We wonder whether the multiplication of information can be avoided and the collective intelligenc...
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies, 2018
The description of an innovative framework built on top of Web-based visual programming environme... more The description of an innovative framework built on top of Web-based visual programming environment is the primary aim of this contribution. In the last decade, many frameworks oriented to visual languages have been introduced in literature to improve the skill on programming languages, but at the best of our knowledge, no framework has been specially designed to support collaborative work on heterogeneous distributed environments. Therefore, SIRENE introduces a new framework in which beginners and experts can cooperate to develop algorithms by using a visual and iconic paradigm. Students, in the classroom or connected from everywhere, can be involved into the definition of the algorithm, can asynchronously modify the common working space, show a visual function to expert, thus the server hosts a shared space in which the algorithms can be visualised and modified by all of the SIRENE clients. SIRENE is primarily a visual framework oriented to collaborative approaches in which each u...
on-line courses are often created by using existing learning objects found on the net. However, t... more on-line courses are often created by using existing learning objects found on the net. However, those learning objects cannot easily be reused for the creation of a new didactic work because they are usually proposed without information on their aims and the typology of users which they are destined to. Moreover, the contents are not clearly synthesized so that the reading of the whole object is often necessary to understand its relevance to the new course. To facilitate this task, we have created a system called SAXEF (System for Automatic eXtraction of lEearning object Features) which allows to automatically extract the basic indicators of any learning object (a sort of DNA) found in Internet. It provides a valuable help to a teacher who is in the process of creating a new on-line course because he/she can easily choose the most appropriate learning objects from the net just by looking at their basic indicators. SAXEF presents a modular structure and we have already developed some...
Empowerment is a process through which people acquire the necessary knowledge and self-awareness ... more Empowerment is a process through which people acquire the necessary knowledge and self-awareness to understand their conditions and treatment options, make informed choices and self-manage their health conditions in daily life, in collaboration with medical professionals. Conversational Agents in healthcare could play an important role in the process of empowering a person but, so far, they have been seldom been used for this purpose. This paper presents the basic principles and preliminary implementation of a conversational health agent for patient empowerment. It dialogues with the user in a “natural” way, collects health data from heterogeneous sources and provides the user with specific and relevant information. This allows a person/patient to create his/her own opinion on health matters in the most complete and objective way, and, therefore, it facilitates the empowerment process.
The integration of programming teachings, in all levels of education, highlights the need to acqu... more The integration of programming teachings, in all levels of education, highlights the need to acquire the art of programming for each individual student through versatile tools based on specific cognitive methods. Diversified linguistic metaphors have to be adopted by the developing frame, in order to highlight the qualities of each student. Therefore, a framework, oriented to learning the art of programming, must foster polychrome constructs representations, a number of data structures and an intuitive interfaces in order to make easier to understand the evolution of the algorithm that have to be developed. The following contribution will present a theoretical formalization of a framework for teaching and learning the art of programming and therefore its development will propose as a graph-based execution and iconic modular interfaces on the methodologies to be developed.
The number of people searching for on-line health information has been steadily growing over the ... more The number of people searching for on-line health information has been steadily growing over the years so it is crucial to understand their specific requirements in order to help them finding easily and quickly the specific in-formation they are looking for. Although generic search engines are typically used by health information seekers as the starting point for searching information, they have been shown to be limited and unsatisfactory because they make generic searches, often overloading the user with the provided amount of results. Moreover, they are not able to provide specific information to different types of users. At the same time, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and provide extracts from medical journals that are mainly useful for medical researchers and experts but not for non-experts. A question then arises: Is it possible to facilitate the search of on-line health/medical information based on specific user requirements? In this pa-per, after a...
2019 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)
Health Information Technology Systems (HITS) are increasingly used to improve the quality of pati... more Health Information Technology Systems (HITS) are increasingly used to improve the quality of patient care while reducing costs. These systems have been developed in response to the changing models of care to an ongoing relationship between patient and care team, supported by the use of technology due to the increased instance of chronic disease. However, the use of HITS may increase the risk to patient safety and security. While standards can be used to address and manage these risks, significant communication problems exist between experts working in different departments. These departments operate in silos often leading to communication breakdowns. For example, risk management stakeholders who are not clinicians may struggle to understand, define and manage risks associated with these systems when talking to medical professionals as they do not understand medical terminology or the associated care processes. In order to overcome this communication problem, we propose the use of the "Three Amigos" approach together with the use of the SIMPLE tool that has been developed to assist patients in understanding medical terms. This paper examines how the "Three Amigos" approach and the SIMPLE tool can be used to improve estimation of severity of risk by non-clinical risk management stakeholders and provides a practical example of their use in a ten step risk management process
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health, 2019
The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is constantly growing. When s... more The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is constantly growing. When searching for health information, different types of users, such as patients, clinicians or medical researchers, have different needs and should easily find the information they are looking for based on their specific requirements. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and, often, overload them with the provided amount of information. On the other hand, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and specialized web sites are often not free and contain focused information built by hand. This paper presents a method to facilitate the search of health information on the web so that users can easily and quickly find information based on their specific requirements. In particular, it allows different types of users to find health web pages with required language complexity levels. To this end, we first use the structured data contained in the web to classify health web pages based on different audience types such as, patients, clinicians and medical researchers. Next, we evaluate the language complexity levels of the different web pages. Finally, we propose a mapping between the language complexity levels and the different audience types that allows us to provide different types of users, e.g., experts and non-experts with tailored web pages in terms of language complexity.
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies - CompSysTech '19, 2019
Search of "right" health information by patients/citizens is an important step towards ... more Search of "right" health information by patients/citizens is an important step towards their empowerment. The number of health information seekers on the Internet is steadily increasing over the years so it is crucial to understand their information needs and the challenges they face during the search process. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and overload them with the amount of information. Moreover, specific search engines/sites mostly work on medical literature and are built by hand. This paper analyses the possibility of providing the user with tailored web information by exploiting the web semantic capabilities and, in particular, those of schema.org and its health-lifesci extension. After presenting a short review of the main user requirements when searching for health information on the Internet, an analysis of schema.org and its health-lifesci extension is shown to understand the main properties and semantic capabilities in the health/medical domain. Finally, an initial mapping among user requirements and schema.org elements is presented in order to provide expert and non-expert user categories with web pages that satisfy their specific requirements.
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies, 2018
Health empowerment can be obtained through an informative and educational intervention to increas... more Health empowerment can be obtained through an informative and educational intervention to increase one's ability to think critically and act autonomously. Medical texts are usually written by professionals and can be difficulty understood by non experts who do not have the same skills and vocabularies. Thus, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary-thesaurusdictionary that can help a non expert to easily find the consumer equivalent of medical (technical) terms and additional consumer information. To this end, we have developed an online multilingual medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary by interconnecting different online sources, i.e., medical vocabularies to create a list of technical terms, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) for translating technical terms into their consumer equivalents and consumer dictionaries for finding explanations of the terms. In addition, we have built an online editor that allows to add new medical terms (with the related consumer information) and modify existing consumer terms and definitions. Furthermore, we have built some practical applications, on top of the medical vocabularythesaurus-dictionary, in order to facilitate the empowerment of patients, or non-experts in general. The applications are located at the data, information and knowledge levels of the 'knowledge pyramid' that, in our case, contains the empowerment at the top level. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems → Data management systems • Information systems → Information systems applications → Collaborative and social computing systems and tools • Applied computing → Life and medical sciences → Health informatics • Applied computing → Education → E-learning
The main tools used to find digital contents in the Web are search engines and directories but th... more The main tools used to find digital contents in the Web are search engines and directories but they are not presently able to understand the user specific needs and starting knowledge. This work presents "U-Search" a new meta engine that allows to create knowledge paths on the Web based on specific user requirements and knowledge levels. To this end, we consider different searcher categories such as a "basic searcher" who knows little about a topic and will look for more information, a "deep searcher" who will look for specific details on a topic that he/she already knows and a "wide searcher" who will look for expanding his/her knowledge domain with topics that are loosely related to the starting topic. The meta engine will suggest words and web pages correlated to each of those searcher categories thus creating new knowledge paths tailored to the real user needs.
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health
A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a "human-to-machine"... more A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a "human-to-machine" communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her empowerment level and the "human-to-human" communication process that occurs between a patient and a healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at the syntactic-technical level, the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the "right" amount of Web content in a language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals. 1 INTRODUCTION According to the World Health Organization (WHO), empowerment is "a process through which people gain greater control over decisions and actions affecting their health" (WHO, 1998). It includes, as a basic step, the acquisition of health/medical information that helps patients/citizens to understand medical conditions and treatments, acquire selfconfidence to discuss them with medical professionals and, together, make the best-informed decisions (Akerkar & Bichile, 2004; Smith, 2004). The main source of health/medical information is, nowadays, the World Wide Web (or Web, for short) with the number of Web health information seekers that have been steadily increasing over the years (Pew Research Center, 2013; Taylor, 2010). Search engines are more and more used as the main tools to provide Web information. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and overload them with the amount of information. The use of a search engine for Web information retrieval entails a human-to-machine communication process between the user (e.g., a patient) and the search engine. It affects, among others, the amount, comprehension and use of the found information. This, in turn, may facilitate or complicate the humanto-human communication process between patients and healthcare professionals such as doctors (Smith, 2004). Communication processes have been modelled in various ways in the past decades. One of the most famous communication model is the one introduced by Morris in relation to its theory of signs (Morris, 1938). It is made up of three levels, i.e., syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. It is paired up by another communication model introduced by Shannon and Weaver (Shannon, 1949) that tackles the problems of communication at the technical, semantic and effectiveness levels. The connection of the two
Web information on different disciplines (mainly technical ones) is mainly created by the differe... more Web information on different disciplines (mainly technical ones) is mainly created by the different experts (engineers, scientists, physicians, lawyers, etc.) who use their own 'technical' language. On the other hand, this information is often read by general users who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts and have difficulties to understand and learn it. In order to allow e-learners to use any document available on the web and understand it, it is desirable to have a system that takes a text written with technical terms and automatically translates it in a plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language. In this work we present the methodology and implementation detalis of such a system and describe the prototype we have developed for the health/medical field.
This paper describes the LOD.CS.UNI.PA Project and its main goal, the transformation process of d... more This paper describes the LOD.CS.UNI.PA Project and its main goal, the transformation process of data already available on the web site of the Computer Science curricula web site at the University of Palermo into data ready to be connected to the LOD. Since 1997 information about bachelor and master degrees in Computer Science at the University of Palermo has been published on the web, and provides a reference point for students, teachers and researchers who have easy access to the information they require. However, the users of the web are now changing; data cannot be published only for human comprehension but intelligent devices also need access to web data and above all they need to understand them. In 2006 Tim Berners Lee presented a star rating system for the data available on the web. Following his five star classification, the aim of the work described in this paper is to raise the level of data concerning degrees in Computer Science at Palermo University, from one star (data ...
Complete learning in science and engineering requires a mixture of theoretical and practical sess... more Complete learning in science and engineering requires a mixture of theoretical and practical sessions carried out in specific labs. Some issues, such as the reduced accessibility to labs and the expensiveness and fragility of instruments, prevent the fully utilization of those labs. To overcome these problems, a virtual laboratory can be used. A virtual lab (or V-Lab) allows full availability of the labs and its instruments but avoids the physical interaction between the students and the lab apparatuses. Two virtual labs have been recently activated within the Computer Science curriculum at the University of Palermo. They belong to the “Computer Networks” and “Operating Systems” courses. In this work, we will present the architecture and implementation details of those labs. In particular, the labs allow students to perform some exercises (router configuration for Computer Networks and visualization of OS details for Operating Systems) made of several steps where the student has to ...
2019 29th Annual Conference of the European Association for Education in Electrical and Information Engineering (EAEEIE), 2019
In this paper, we present a framework named SIRENE, a Web-based visual programming environment, w... more In this paper, we present a framework named SIRENE, a Web-based visual programming environment, where teachers and students can collaboratively interact, using a flexible and versatile definition of visual programming code instead of pre-established rules. After the description of the architecture of the SIRENE framework, the preliminary results of a pilot trial with secondary school students will be presented; these results will lead to the final remarks and directions for further developments.
Coding or programming is very important for a number of tasks and this is true not only in proble... more Coding or programming is very important for a number of tasks and this is true not only in problem solving but also in the computer science and over. Many skills have to be acquired before to have a high familiarity degree with this science. In the studies for methods of coding, students have a great problem for understanding on how to solve and to develop algorithms in a rational way, thus the expertise on how to solve and to develop algorithms is the most difficult to acquire for all students in whatever age. This paper introduces the prototype of a framework able to run in the web space and to be supported by different devices and browsers, useful to integrate a number of collaborative contexts for teaching and learning in a workroom, which can be hosted in different academic sites. This framework uses a set of visual objects to define the own program, and to understand how to solve and develop the owner algorithms, and it is in accordance to a blended approach in which students ...
More and more people use Internet to look for medical information for understanding and learning ... more More and more people use Internet to look for medical information for understanding and learning but different users, such as experts (e.g., physicians) and consumers (e.g., patients), have different needs and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge. Generic and specific search engines and specialized health sites either do not exploit the whole web or overload users with information of different nature. On the contrary, it is important for a user to immediately find the information on the topic being explored that has the 'right' amount of information and level of complexity. This paper presents a meta search engine of medical information on the web, U-MedSearch, that, for any keyword(s) provides four different lists of terms, and in turn web pages, on the basis of the used language (consumer or expert) and correlation degree (strong or loose) with the keyword(s) thus facilitating the search and learning paths of the different types of learners.
Communication and Cognition. Monographies, 2006
The search of a specific topic in Internet provides a lot of information and much of this informa... more The search of a specific topic in Internet provides a lot of information and much of this information has a didactic structure. However, the found "learning objects" cannot easily be reused for the creation of a new didactic work because they are usually proposed without information on their aims and the typology of users which they are destined to. Moreover, the contents are not clearly synthesized so that the reading of the whole object is often necessary to identify them. The use of Internet for the creation of a new didactic work often means just a recompilation of already existing objects using the "cut&paste" widespread practice. As a consequence, the information about the same topic is multiplied and the net is mainly used as a deposit. The action of the collective intelligence is thus only limited to archive querying and not to a real cooperation among users. We wonder whether the multiplication of information can be avoided and the collective intelligenc...
Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies, 2018
The description of an innovative framework built on top of Web-based visual programming environme... more The description of an innovative framework built on top of Web-based visual programming environment is the primary aim of this contribution. In the last decade, many frameworks oriented to visual languages have been introduced in literature to improve the skill on programming languages, but at the best of our knowledge, no framework has been specially designed to support collaborative work on heterogeneous distributed environments. Therefore, SIRENE introduces a new framework in which beginners and experts can cooperate to develop algorithms by using a visual and iconic paradigm. Students, in the classroom or connected from everywhere, can be involved into the definition of the algorithm, can asynchronously modify the common working space, show a visual function to expert, thus the server hosts a shared space in which the algorithms can be visualised and modified by all of the SIRENE clients. SIRENE is primarily a visual framework oriented to collaborative approaches in which each u...
on-line courses are often created by using existing learning objects found on the net. However, t... more on-line courses are often created by using existing learning objects found on the net. However, those learning objects cannot easily be reused for the creation of a new didactic work because they are usually proposed without information on their aims and the typology of users which they are destined to. Moreover, the contents are not clearly synthesized so that the reading of the whole object is often necessary to understand its relevance to the new course. To facilitate this task, we have created a system called SAXEF (System for Automatic eXtraction of lEearning object Features) which allows to automatically extract the basic indicators of any learning object (a sort of DNA) found in Internet. It provides a valuable help to a teacher who is in the process of creating a new on-line course because he/she can easily choose the most appropriate learning objects from the net just by looking at their basic indicators. SAXEF presents a modular structure and we have already developed some...
Empowerment is a process through which people acquire the necessary knowledge and self-awareness ... more Empowerment is a process through which people acquire the necessary knowledge and self-awareness to understand their conditions and treatment options, make informed choices and self-manage their health conditions in daily life, in collaboration with medical professionals. Conversational Agents in healthcare could play an important role in the process of empowering a person but, so far, they have been seldom been used for this purpose. This paper presents the basic principles and preliminary implementation of a conversational health agent for patient empowerment. It dialogues with the user in a “natural” way, collects health data from heterogeneous sources and provides the user with specific and relevant information. This allows a person/patient to create his/her own opinion on health matters in the most complete and objective way, and, therefore, it facilitates the empowerment process.
The integration of programming teachings, in all levels of education, highlights the need to acqu... more The integration of programming teachings, in all levels of education, highlights the need to acquire the art of programming for each individual student through versatile tools based on specific cognitive methods. Diversified linguistic metaphors have to be adopted by the developing frame, in order to highlight the qualities of each student. Therefore, a framework, oriented to learning the art of programming, must foster polychrome constructs representations, a number of data structures and an intuitive interfaces in order to make easier to understand the evolution of the algorithm that have to be developed. The following contribution will present a theoretical formalization of a framework for teaching and learning the art of programming and therefore its development will propose as a graph-based execution and iconic modular interfaces on the methodologies to be developed.
The number of people searching for on-line health information has been steadily growing over the ... more The number of people searching for on-line health information has been steadily growing over the years so it is crucial to understand their specific requirements in order to help them finding easily and quickly the specific in-formation they are looking for. Although generic search engines are typically used by health information seekers as the starting point for searching information, they have been shown to be limited and unsatisfactory because they make generic searches, often overloading the user with the provided amount of results. Moreover, they are not able to provide specific information to different types of users. At the same time, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and provide extracts from medical journals that are mainly useful for medical researchers and experts but not for non-experts. A question then arises: Is it possible to facilitate the search of on-line health/medical information based on specific user requirements? In this pa-per, after a...
2019 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)
Health Information Technology Systems (HITS) are increasingly used to improve the quality of pati... more Health Information Technology Systems (HITS) are increasingly used to improve the quality of patient care while reducing costs. These systems have been developed in response to the changing models of care to an ongoing relationship between patient and care team, supported by the use of technology due to the increased instance of chronic disease. However, the use of HITS may increase the risk to patient safety and security. While standards can be used to address and manage these risks, significant communication problems exist between experts working in different departments. These departments operate in silos often leading to communication breakdowns. For example, risk management stakeholders who are not clinicians may struggle to understand, define and manage risks associated with these systems when talking to medical professionals as they do not understand medical terminology or the associated care processes. In order to overcome this communication problem, we propose the use of the "Three Amigos" approach together with the use of the SIMPLE tool that has been developed to assist patients in understanding medical terms. This paper examines how the "Three Amigos" approach and the SIMPLE tool can be used to improve estimation of severity of risk by non-clinical risk management stakeholders and provides a practical example of their use in a ten step risk management process
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health, 2019
The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is constantly growing. When s... more The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is constantly growing. When searching for health information, different types of users, such as patients, clinicians or medical researchers, have different needs and should easily find the information they are looking for based on their specific requirements. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and, often, overload them with the provided amount of information. On the other hand, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and specialized web sites are often not free and contain focused information built by hand. This paper presents a method to facilitate the search of health information on the web so that users can easily and quickly find information based on their specific requirements. In particular, it allows different types of users to find health web pages with required language complexity levels. To this end, we first use the structured data contained in the web to classify health web pages based on different audience types such as, patients, clinicians and medical researchers. Next, we evaluate the language complexity levels of the different web pages. Finally, we propose a mapping between the language complexity levels and the different audience types that allows us to provide different types of users, e.g., experts and non-experts with tailored web pages in terms of language complexity.
Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies - CompSysTech '19, 2019
Search of "right" health information by patients/citizens is an important step towards ... more Search of "right" health information by patients/citizens is an important step towards their empowerment. The number of health information seekers on the Internet is steadily increasing over the years so it is crucial to understand their information needs and the challenges they face during the search process. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and overload them with the amount of information. Moreover, specific search engines/sites mostly work on medical literature and are built by hand. This paper analyses the possibility of providing the user with tailored web information by exploiting the web semantic capabilities and, in particular, those of schema.org and its health-lifesci extension. After presenting a short review of the main user requirements when searching for health information on the Internet, an analysis of schema.org and its health-lifesci extension is shown to understand the main properties and semantic capabilities in the health/medical domain. Finally, an initial mapping among user requirements and schema.org elements is presented in order to provide expert and non-expert user categories with web pages that satisfy their specific requirements.