arXiv subjects

Cristina Gena

Publications and source records attributed to Cristina Gena.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Preliminary results of a therapeutic lab for promoting autonomies in autistic children

This extended abtract describes the preliminary qualitative results coming from a therapeutic laboratory focused on the use of the Pepper robot to promote autonomies and functional acquisitions in highly functioning (Asperger) children with autism. The field lab, ideated and led by a multidisciplinary team, involved 4 children, aged 11-13, who attended the laboratory sessions once a week for four months.

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arXiv2023

Employing Socially Assistive Robots in Elderly Care (longer version)

Recently, it has been considering robotics to face world population aging. According to the WHO, in 2050 there will be about 2.1 billion people over 60 years old worldwide causing a persistent growing need of assistance and a shortage of manpower for delivering congruous assistance. Therefore, seniors' QoL is continuously threatened. Socially Assistive Robotics proposes itself as a solution. To improve SARs acceptability, it is necessary to tailor the system's characteristics with respect to the target needs and issues through the analysis of previous and current studies in the HRI field. Through the examination of the state of the art of social robotics in elderly care, past case studies and paper research about SARs' efficiency, it has been proposed two potential solution examples for two different scenarios, applying two different SARs: Pepper and Nao robots.

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arXiv2023

A sensemaking system for grouping and suggesting stories from multiple affective viewpoints in museums

This article presents an affective based sensemaking system for grouping and suggesting stories created by the users about the items of a museum. By relying on the TCL commonsense reasoning framework1, the system exploits the spatial structure of the Plutchik's wheel of emotions to organize the stories according to their extracted emotions. The process of emotion extraction, reasoning and suggestion is triggered by an app, called GAMGame, and integrated with the sensemaking engine. Following the framework of Citizen Curation, the system allows classifying and suggesting stories encompassing cultural items able to evoke not only the very same emotions of already experienced or preferred museum objects, but also novel items sharing different emotional stances and, therefore, able to break the filter bubble effect and open the users' view towards more inclusive and empathy-based interpretations of cultural content. The system has been designed tested, in the context of the H2020EU SPICE project (Social cohesion, Participation, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement), in cooperation the community of the d/Deaf and on the collection of the Gallery of Modern Art (GAM) in Turin. We describe the user centered design process of the web app and of its components and we report the results concerning the effectiveness of the of the diversity seeking, affective driven, recommendations of stories.

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arXiv2023

Mental state attribution to educational robots: an experience with children in primary school

The work presented in this paper was carried out in the context of the project Girls and boys: one day at university promoted by the City of Turin together with the University of Turin. We were responsible for two educational activities on robotics and coding hosted at the Computer Science Department, which made one of its laboratories available for this kind of lesson. At the conclusion of the lab's sessions, children compiled the Attribution of Mental State (AMS) questionnaire, which is a measure of mental states that participants attribute to robots, namely the user's perception of the robot's mental qualities as compared to humans. We distributed the questionnaires both to children attending the educational robotics lab and to children performing coding activities. Results show that the first group attributed higher mental qualities to the robots, compared to the attribution given by children that did not have a direct experience with a robot.

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arXiv2022

Social Assistive Robotics for Autistic Children

This paper introduces the project Social Assistive Robotics for Autistic Children aimed at using robotic therapy for autism. The goal of the project is testing autistic children's interactions with the social robot NAO. In particular the robot will support the operators (psychologists, educators, speech therapists etc.) in their work. The innovative aspect of the project is that the children robot interaction will consider the children's emotions and specific features and the robot will adapt its behavior accordingly.

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arXiv2022

Cloud-based user modeling for social robots: a first attempt

A social robot is an autonomous robot that interact with people by engaging in social emotive behaviors, skills, capacities, and rules attached to its collaborative role. In order to achieve these goals we believe that modeling the interaction with the user and adapt the robot behavior to the user herself are fundamental for its social role. This paper presents our first attempt to integrate user modeling features in social and affective robots. We propose a cloud-based architecture for modeling the user-robot interaction in order to reuse the approach with different kind of social robots.

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arXiv2022

Co-Design and implementation of an open-source 3D printed robot

During the 2017-18 academic year we carried out a series of coding activities, lasting about 3 months, in a third of the Giulia Falletti primary school in Barolo in Turin (Gena et a., 2020). These activities aimed to teach students not only the basics of programming, but also to introduce a new language and a new way of thinking and solving problems: computational thinking. The class consisted of 25 pupils: 14 males and 11 females, which we then operationally divided into two working groups (13 + 12) to make coding lessons more manageable and provide better childcare. The lessons lasted one hour and were conducted, in the presence of one of the teachers, by a computer teacher assisted by a student / facilitator. At the end of the three months of this positive experience, we realized that having an educational robot that can perform the same kind of actions that virtual robots do, like those of code.org, is very useful for children, especially to help them to solve orientation problems. Therefore, since no commercial robot had the characteristics we wanted, we decided to create an educational robot from scratch, equipped with social, interactive and emotional skills, able to involve children and establish an emotional bond with them in order to increase their learning and involvement. We decided from the beginning to design the robot as an open source project, made at a low cost, proposing a kit that can be easily reproduced and improved by anyone who wishes.

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arXiv2022

Incorporating Personality Traits in User Modeling for EUD

Personality traits such as Need for Cognition, Locus of Control, Mindset and Self-efficacy could impact the perception, acceptance and appreciation of recommendations provided to support configuration tasks in the End User Development (EUD) context. In this paper we describe the user model services we have developed to measure such traits. These services can be accessed by users through a simple web interface and can be queried by EUD applications by means of REST API.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

A Model and Tool for Community Engagement Case Study: Community Engagement in the Bisotun World Heritage Site

Including local participation in cultural heritage management has always been a concern since the Venice Charter so far (1964). In addition, the Faro Convention (2005) shifted focus from cultural heritage values to the values of cultural heritage for society. In this case, it is necessary to achieve the maximum engagement of stakeholders in all stages of management. Nowadays, the concept of community engagement in all stages of cultural heritage management is accepted for almost everyone. But the idea of citizen participation is a little like eating spinach: no one is against it in principle because it is good for you. If we accept that community engagement is good for us, the problem is how to let people participate? Not only communities are not very aware of their rights on their cultural heritage, but also cultural heritage authorities are unwilling to involve people in their decision-making process. Suppose, in an ideal society of course, people know that the cultural heritage is their properties and they would like to manage their assets by themselves, and authorities have realized that they are not omni-knowledge and omni-potent, there is still an unsolved problem, no one knows how we want to implement a people-centered approach in cultural heritage context. This how is referring to two main issues related to community engagement approach; lack of recognized method, on the one hand, and determining an appropriate tool, on the other hand. This paper is proposing a practical model and a simple tool for including local community in decision-making process in the Bisotun World heritage Site.

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arXiv2022

Visual and unplugged coding lessons with smart toys

Our Computer science k-12 education research group and the educational toy company Quercetti have been collaborating together to design and manufacture toys that help stimulate and consolidate so-called computational thinking. This approach is inspired by methods already consolidated in the literature and widespread worldwide such as the Bebras tasks and CS-Unplugged. This paper describes two smart toys, their design process, educational activities that can be proposed by teachers exploiting the two toys, the evaluation's results from some teachers, and finally feedback and reviews from buyers. The main activities proposed by these toys leverage visual coding through small colored physical items (e.g., pegs and balls) to deliver the unplugged activities to young users.

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arXiv2022

An affective and adaptive educational robot

In this paper we present an educational robot called Wolly, designed to engage children in an affective and social interaction. Indeed, we are now focusing on its role as an educational and affective robot capable of being controlled by coding instructions and at the same time interacting verbally and affectively with children by recognizing their emotions and remembering their interests, and adapting its behavior accordingly.

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arXiv2022

Educational robotics for children and their teachers

This paper describes a Google Educator funded project devoted to the training of teachers (primary and secondary school) through an e-learning platform that will introduce them to educational robotics using Wolly, a social, educational and affective robot.

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arXiv2022

Experimenting Touchless Gestural Interaction for a University Public Web-based Display

Interest in and development of touchless gestural interfaces has recently exploded, fueled by the diffusion of both commercial midair gesture platforms and public interactive displays. This paper focuses on an application based on Microsoft Kinect that allows students to browse a university website, hosted on a public display, through simple gestures. We present two empirical evaluations where we evaluated how users react to this new way of interaction. In addition to confirming the current lack of standards, our results provide some inspiration for the design of touchless interaction.

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arXiv2022

Sugar, Salt & Pepper -- Humanoid robotics for autism

This paper introduces an experimental trial that will take place from February to June 2021, and which will see the use of the Pepper robot in a therapeutic laboratory on autonomies that will promote functional acquisitions in children diagnosed with high functioning autism/Asperger's syndrome.

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arXiv2022

Autistic Children's Mental Model of an Humanoid Robot

This position paper introduces the results of an initial card sorting experiment based on the reactions and questions of a group of children with autism working with a humanoid robot in a therapeutic laboratory on autonomy.

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arXiv2022

An end-user coding-based environment for programming an educational affective robot

In this paper we present an open source educational robot, designed both to engage children in an affective and social interaction, and to be programmable also in its social and affective behaviour. Indeed the robot, in addition to classic programming tasks, can also be programmed as a social robot. In addition to movements, the user can make the robot express emotions and make it say things. The robot can also be left in autonomous mode, in which it is able to carry out both biometric user's features and emotion recognition, and greeting the user.

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arXiv2022

Kids Computer Interaction with a Focus on Story Telling and Educational Robotics

In the invited talk at KDAH 2018 workshop (CIKM 2018 conference) I have presented two projects carried out in our HCI lab and target to child: the first one is related to the evaluation in the wild of of a storytelling app for kids based on the swipe story approach, the second one is related to Wolly, an educational robot co-designed with children.

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arXiv2022

UX Personas for defining robot's character and personality

This paper describes the use of UX Personas for defining a stable character for the Pepper robot. This approach generated from the first analysis of the social interactions that occurred between Pepper and a group of children with autism working with the robot in a therapeutic laboratory on autonomy.

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