The e-Lite research group will participate to the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), one of the most important conference in the field of human-computer interaction. The 2017 edition will take place in Denver, Colorado, USA, from the 6th to the 11th of May.

Luigi De Russis and Alberto Monge Roffarello will present two late-breaking works on Monday and Tuesday (May 8-9) about notification preferences and end-user programming in the IoT.

In particular, Alberto will present a work entitled A High-Level Approach Towards End User Development in the IoT, about a new abstract representation for composing trigger-action rules (i.e., if something happens, then do something else") in the IoT.
The paper analyzes the representation models adopted by contemporary trigger-action platforms (like IFTTT) and identifies some open issues: e.g., they are not suitable to face the expected growth of the IoT, nor they allow to adapt to yet undiscovered IoT services. Then, the paper presents a possible solution for these issues in the form of a "high level" representation, generic and technology-independent. In the paper, we show that such a representation allows end-users to create abstract trigger-action rules able to adapt to different contextual situations.

Luigi, instead, will present a work entitled On the Benefit of Adding User Preferences to Notification Delivery, about the impact of letting users define some preferences for managing the notifications coming from their own devices, be them smartphones, tablets, or other IoT entities.
The paper explores a preference-based approach towards smart notification delivery. By considering existing in-the-wild studies that directly involve users, the paper defines and proposes a set of preferences to customize the notification delivery. Finally, it reports the evaluation of the understandability of such preferences, and the acceptance of the preference-based approach, with a preliminary user study. Results show that the preferences were easily understood, and that users are willing to set them up in their daily life.