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Abstract. This paper presents LECTOR, a system that helps educators in understanding when students have stopped paying attention to the educational process and assists them in reengaging the students to the current learning activity. LECTOR aims to take advantage of the ambient facilities that "smart classrooms" have to offer by (i) enabling educators to employ their preferred attention monitoring strategies (including any well-established activity recognition techniques) in order to identify inattentive behaviors and (ii) recommending interventions for motivating distracted students when deemed necessary. Furthermore, LECTOR offers an educator friendly design studio that enables teachers to create or modify the rules that trigger "inattention alarms", as well as tailor the intervention mechanism to the needs of their course by modifying the respective rules. This paper presents the rationale behind the design of LECTOR and outlines its key features and facilities.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services and their integration in intelligent environments creates the need for a simple yet effective way of controlling and communicating with them. Towards such a direction, this work presents ParlAmI, a conversational framework featuring a multimodal chatbot that permits users to create simple “if-then” rules to define the behavior of an intelligent environment. ParlAmI delivers a disembodied conversational agent in the form of a messaging application named MAI, and an embodied conversational agent named nAoMI employing the programmable humanoid robot NAO. This paper describes the requirements and architecture of ParlAmI, the infrastructure of the “Intelligent Home” in which ParlAmI is deployed, the characteristics and functionality of both MAI and nAoMI, and finally presents the findings of a user experience evaluation that was conducted with the participation of sixteen users.

This paper presents “Home game,” a multimodal interactive educational game that supports training in independent living for children with cognitive disabilities. It is intended to be used under the supervision of educators in a rehabilitation center. The game features a variety of exercises that incorporate multimedia, virtual environments, tangible, and playful interaction to facilitate learning of the main rooms of a house, daily routines, and how to avoid inappropriate or prevent hazardous behaviors. It enhances touch‐based interaction with physical manipulation through printed cards on a tabletop setup, using a webcam to recognize and track cards on a board. This paper describes the system, along with the development process and the results of a preliminary user‐based evaluation. Furthermore, it reports the insights and lessons learned throughout the process of developing tangible educational technologies for children with cognitive impairments, in terms of functionality, interaction, and evaluation with children.

The emergence of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm and the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services unveiled new potentials for the domain of domestic living, where the line between “the computer” and the (intelligent) environment becomes altogether invisible. Particularly, the residents of a house can use the living room not only as a traditional social and individual space where many activities take place, but also as a smart ecosystem that (a) enhances leisure activities by providing a rich suite of entertainment applications, (b) implements a home control middleware, (c) acts as an intervention host that is able to display appropriate content when the users need help or support, (d) behaves as an intelligent agent that communicates with the users in a natural manner and assists them throughout their daily activities, (e) presents a notification hub that provides personalized alerts according to contextual information, and (f) becomes an intermediary communication center for the family. This paper (i) describes how the “Intelligent Living Room” realizes these newly emerged roles, (ii) presents the process that was followed in order to design the living room environment, (iii) introduces the hardware and software facilities that were developed in order to improve quality of life, and (iv) reports the findings of various evaluation experiments conducted to assess the overall User Experience (UX).

A new discipline at the intersection of the development and operation of software systems known as DevOps has seen significant growth recently. Among the wide range of tasks of DevOps professionals, we focus on that of selecting appropriate cloud deployments for distributed applications. Despite the advent of automated software deployment and management frameworks, reasoning about good deployments still requires interaction with experts, often through discussions on online technical forums and social networks. Current social networking technologies offer basic ways to communicate. Within the DevOps community, communication on application structure and cloud deployment tradeoffs could become more effective by using knowledge present in global community-sourced information repositories. In this paper we argue for the benefits of tapping into such knowledge and for seamlessly feeding it back into the social networking platform. The social networking platform presented in this paper integrates social networking with automated deployment of applications on multi-clouds and with knowledge drawn from community-sourced information repositories. The implementation leverages two such repositories, the PaaSage repository and Chef Supermarket. Our user evaluation experiments demonstrate the value created for DevOps professionals.

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