Papers by Adriano Venturini
This paper describes a Interactive Itinerary Planning web system that supports travellers in the ... more This paper describes a Interactive Itinerary Planning web system that supports travellers in the selection and comparison and bundling of travel products. In addition to traditional information search and filtering, the system supports interactive query management to help its users to plan a leisure trip. Case Base Reasoning and similarity base retrieval techniques are used for selecting and ranking suggested travel services (e.g., accommodations or sport activities) as well as innovative advanced techniques to help the user to refine the query in the case it fails to satisfy the user’s information needs.
Museums and cultural heritage sites have a notable need to engage visitors in different ways. Wit... more Museums and cultural heritage sites have a notable need to engage visitors in different ways. Within the work of the meSch project, we take the stance that the materiality complements and completes cognition, and therefore a personally meaningful and sensorily rich experience with museum exhibits and place can greatly improve both the visitors’ experience and their appreciation of the museum’s cultural values. By empowering cultural heritage professionals with a technological platform to help them create their own interactive, smart, and tangible exhibitions, meSch aims at making the encounter of digital and material more sustainable in museums. At the same time, it favors the creation of a do-it-yourself community that shares experiences and learns, grows, and develops over time, inspired by concurrent developments in new technology. This paper discusses the current efforts in meSch towards the definition of a general formalism, inspired by co-design activities with cultural herita...
This paper summarises the work carried out in the EU project meSch and presented at the 2 nd Digi... more This paper summarises the work carried out in the EU project meSch and presented at the 2 nd Digital Heritage Expo held in Granada in 2015. meSch, Material EncounterS with digital Cultural Heritage, bridges the gap between visitors’ cultural heritage experience on-site and on-line by providing a platform for the creation of tangible smart exhibits, that will enable heritage professionals to compose and realise physical artefacts enriched by digital content without the need for specialised technical knowledge. The platform includes an authoring toolkit for the composition of physical/digital narratives that map on interactive artefacts, and an embedded multi-sensor digital system platform for the construction of ad-hoc physical smart exhibits.
Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
The technological advances brought about by the Internet of Things enable new opportunities for a... more The technological advances brought about by the Internet of Things enable new opportunities for a more direct interaction among users, objects, and places. This is an extremely valuable innovation for the cultural heritage sector, as it allows a more transparent use of technology in the digital augmentation of museums and cultural heritage sites. The possibility to augment physical objects with sensors detecting when they are moved and manipulated enables scenarios where descriptive information about objects is presented to users at the very exact time they are looking at them, stimulating engagement. This article describes a collaborative research effort among cultural heritage professionals, human--computer interaction experts, and developers that was aimed at investigating the goals and constraints curators consider for a physical encounter between visitors and historic relics. In a case study, we co-designed an interactive plinth centred on tangible interaction and evaluated the...
The Internet of Things (IoT) enables new ways for exploiting the synergy between the physical and... more The Internet of Things (IoT) enables new ways for exploiting the synergy between the physical and the digital world and therefore promises a more direct and active interaction between tourists and local products and places. In this article we show how, by distributing sensors/actuators in the environment or attaching them to objects, one can sense, trace and respond to users' actions onsite. Our research method analysis specific scenarios (case studies) of tangible interaction. We first discuss important issues, which were identified in these scenarios, and are related to log analysis, system usability, and extended models for learning user preferences. Then, the lessons learned in these specific cases have informed the constructive design of a wider scope infrastructure, which is here described and motivated. We envisage the tight integration of localized IoT solutions into a comprehensive mobile information system for tourism.
European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2006
Museums and cultural heritage sites have a notable need to engage visitors in different ways. Wit... more Museums and cultural heritage sites have a notable need to engage visitors in different ways. Within the work of the meSch project, we take the stance that the materiality complements and completes cognition, and therefore a personally meaningful and sensorily rich experience with museum exhibits and place can greatly improve both the visitors' experience and their appreciation of the museum's cultural values. By empowering cultural heritage professionals with a technological platform to help them create their own interactive, smart, and tangible exhibitions, meSch aims at making the encounter of digital and material more sustainable in museums. At the same time, it favors the creation of a do-ityourself community that shares experiences and learns, grows, and develops over time, inspired by concurrent developments in new technology. This paper discusses the current efforts in meSch towards the definition of a general formalism, inspired by co-design activities with cultural heritage professionals, for specifying "recipes" for creating technology-augmented experiences to enhance the museum visit. Ingredients to such recipes include the appropriate description of digital information to be associated to objects and locations in an exhibition, as well as the detailed specification of how visitors' movements and actions can activate the contextualized presentation of that content.
The actual usefulness, adoption and success of a mobile information system much depends on the ap... more The actual usefulness, adoption and success of a mobile information system much depends on the appropriate design of the available functionalities and of the interaction interface. A thorough elicitation of functional requirements carried out during the system design phase is certainly essential, though it is often difficult to identify and analyze in advance all possible use-scenarios. This paper describes an evaluation method to discover additional functional requirements and usability problems through the context-based analysis of session logs. The method has been applied to evaluate a mobile tourism support system in ecological conditions to understand non-biased, free usage. The results provide evidence to the impact of contextual conditions over users’ interaction behaviour and informational needs. Some general design guidelines have been derived for functionalities and forms of adaptivity to be integrated in mobile services for the tourism sector.
Information Systems and e-Business Management, 2014
ABSTRACT Conversational recommender systems are E-Commerce applications which interactively assis... more ABSTRACT Conversational recommender systems are E-Commerce applications which interactively assist online users to acquire their interaction goals during their sessions. In our previous work, we have proposed and validated a methodology for conversational systems which autonomously learns the particular web page to display to the user, at each step of the session. We employed reinforcement learning to learn an optimal strategy, i.e., one that is personalized for a real user population. In this paper, we extend our methodology by allowing it to autonomously learn and update the optimal strategy dynamically (at run-time), and individually for each user. This learning occurs perpetually after every session, as long as the user continues her interaction with the system. We evaluate our approach in an off-line simulation with four simulated users, as well as in an online evaluation with thirteen real users. The results show that an optimal strategy is learnt and updated for each real and simulated user. For each simulated user, the optimal behavior is reasonably adapted to this user’s characteristics, but converges after several hundred sessions. For each real user, the optimal behavior converges only in several sessions. It provides assistance only in certain situations, allowing many users to buy several products together in shorter time and with more page-views and lesser number of query executions. We prove that our approach is novel and show how its current limitations can catered.
… in tourism 2004: …, 2004
An Experimental Usability Test for different Destination Recommender Systems Andreas H. Zinsa Ulr... more An Experimental Usability Test for different Destination Recommender Systems Andreas H. Zinsa Ulrike Bauernfeinda Fabio Del Missierb Adriano Venturinib Hildegard Rumetshofer0 a Institute for Tourism and Leisure Studies Vienna University of Economics and Business ...
Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2010, 2010
Designing effective and efficient user interfaces for supporting complex tasks on mobile devices ... more Designing effective and efficient user interfaces for supporting complex tasks on mobile devices remains an intriguing problem. The rapidly evolving hardware and software mobile environments are complicating the design of elaborated applications like travel planning. Allowing mobile users to review their travel-plan information while travelling has been addressed by a recent R&D project. In order to improve usability and derive good design guidelines, two alternative WAP-based solutions were experimented: one based on ...
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Papers by Adriano Venturini