Florian Daniel

Alessandro Pina, Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel

In this paper we explore the opportunities brought by cognitive augmentation to provide a more natural and accessible web browsing experience. We explore these opportunities through \textit{conversational web browsing}, an emerging interaction paradigm for the Web that enables blind and visually impaired users (BVIP), as well as regular users, to access the contents and features of websites through conversational agents. Informed by the literature, our previous work and prototyping exercises, we derive a conceptual framework for supporting BVIP conversational web browsing needs, to then focus on the challenges of automatically providing this support, describing our early work and prototype that leverage heuristics that consider structural and content features only.

Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel, Fabio Casati et al.

Chatbots are software agents that are able to interact with humans in natural language. Their intuitive interaction paradigm is expected to significantly reshape the software landscape of tomorrow, while already today chatbots are invading a multitude of scenarios and contexts. This article takes a developer's perspective, identifies a set of architectural patterns that capture different chatbot integration scenarios, and reviews state-of-the-art development aids.

Pietro Chittò, Marcos Baez, Florian Daniel et al.

In this paper, we describe the foundations for generating a chatbot out of a website equipped with simple, bot-specific HTML annotations. The approach is part of what we call conversational web browsing, i.e., a dialog-based, natural language interaction with websites. The goal is to enable users to use content and functionality accessible through rendered UIs by "talking to websites" instead of by operating the graphical UI using keyboard and mouse. The chatbot mediates between the user and the website, operates its graphical UI on behalf of the user, and informs the user about the state of interaction. We describe the conceptual vocabulary and annotation format, the supporting conversational middleware and techniques, and the implementation of a demo able to deliver conversational web browsing experiences through Amazon Alexa.

Svetlana Nikitina, Florian Daniel, Marcos Baez et al.

In this work-in-progress paper we discuss the challenges in identifying effective and scalable crowd-based strategies for designing content, conversation logic, and meaningful metrics for a reminiscence chatbot targeted at older adults. We formalize the problem and outline the main research questions that drive the research agenda in chatbot design for reminiscence and for relational agents for older adults in general.

Florian Daniel, Pavel Kucherbaev, Cinzia Cappiello et al.

Crowdsourcing enables one to leverage on the intelligence and wisdom of potentially large groups of individuals toward solving problems. Common problems approached with crowdsourcing are labeling images, translating or transcribing text, providing opinions or ideas, and similar - all tasks that computers are not good at or where they may even fail altogether. The introduction of humans into computations and/or everyday work, however, also poses critical, novel challenges in terms of quality control, as the crowd is typically composed of people with unknown and very diverse abilities, skills, interests, personal objectives and technological resources. This survey studies quality in the context of crowdsourcing along several dimensions, so as to define and characterize it and to understand the current state of the art. Specifically, this survey derives a quality model for crowdsourcing tasks, identifies the methods and techniques that can be used to assess the attributes of the model, and the actions and strategies that help prevent and mitigate quality problems. An analysis of how these features are supported by the state of the art further identifies open issues and informs an outlook on hot future research directions.

Jan Mendling, Ingo Weber, Wil van der Aalst et al.

Blockchain technology promises a sizable potential for executing inter-organizational business processes without requiring a central party serving as a single point of trust (and failure). This paper analyzes its impact on business process management (BPM). We structure the discussion using two BPM frameworks, namely the six BPM core capabilities and the BPM lifecycle. This paper provides research directions for investigating the application of blockchain technology to BPM.

Florian Daniel, Pavel Kucherbaev

This work-in-progress paper describes a vision, i.e., that of fast and reliable software user experience studies conducted with the help from the crowd. Commonly, user studies are controlled in-lab activities that require the instruction, monitoring, interviewing and compensation of a number of participants that are typically hard to recruit. The goal of this work is to study which user study methods can instead be crowdsourced to generic audiences to enable the conduct of user studies without the need for expensive lab experiments. The challenge is understanding how to conduct crowdsourced studies without giving up too many of the guarantees in-lab settings are able to provide.

Pavel Kucherbaev, Azad Abad, Stefano Tranquillini et al.

In this paper we present a mobile crowdsourcing platform CrowdCafe, where people can perform microtasks using their smartphones while they ride a bus, travel by train, stand in a queue or wait for an appointment. These microtasks are executed in exchange for rewards provided by local stores, such as coffee, desserts and bus tickets. We present the concept, the implementation and the evaluation by conducting a study with 52 participants, having 1108 tasks completed.