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Settore scientifico disciplinare di attività: INF_01 - INFORMATICA

The research work of Cristina Gena mainly focused on these aspects:

  • Human Computer Interaction, HCI; Interaction Design, User Experience;
  • Multimodal Interaction (Mobile, Natural, Gestural Interaction, BCI, gaze-based interaction, etc.);  
  • Child-computer interaction and interaction design for children
  • Human Robot Interaction
  • Information visualization
  • Intelligent User Interfaces, their Design and Evaluation;
  • User Modeling, Adaptive, and Personalized Systems and their Empirical Evaluation;


As PI/scientific officer, she obtained more than EUR 600,000 in research funding between national and regional projects, agreements with companies and public bodies, and awards.

She was/is: 
  • scientific officer for the regional project 3DVRS SUITE - Bando Tecnologie Smart 2011 (Research and technological development projects to be carried out within the Piedmont Region)
  • scientific officer for the regional project ReAL CODE (Recommendation Agents for Local Contents in an Open Data Environment) - STRUCTURAL FUNDS POR FESR 2007/2013 of the Piedmont Region
  • task leader in the regional project HOME, on HCI issues for Industry 4.0
  • principal Investigator of the BCIAI4SLA project, financed by the CRT Foundation, calls 2018
  • principal Investigator of the BCIpar4SLA project, funded by Fondazione CRT, calls 2021
  • head of the local unit of the 2017 PRIN entitled Empathy
  • head of the local unit of the PRIN 2022 entitled FEEL GOOD! SOCIAL ROBOT-MEDIATED VIDEO MODELING INTERVENTION TO FACILITATE COMMUNICATION BETWEEN HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONAL AND PATIENT WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

She was also responsible for several conventions with public bodies and companies, such as the City of Turin, the Valle d'Aosta Region, the company Quercetti SpA, Intesa SanPaolo Innovation Center, Paideia Foundation.
 
In 2019, he won the Google Educator Professional Development Award with an educational robotics project on which to train school teachers. In 2023, he won the SIGCHI Development Fund grant  for the innovative proposal 'Expanding hybrid CHItaly 2023', a conference for which he was general chair.


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WOLLY is the educational robot designed and realized at the Computer Science Department of UNITO, following a co-design approach, involving primary school children (IVA of the Falletti Primary School, Turin) in the ideation and design phase (read the ARSO 2018 paper for more info) and the ARSO presentation.
We have designed the appearance and structure of the robot with OpenSCAD, and 3d printed its body (dressed in a jacket and a papillon) using a slightly transparent white material.
At the same time, starting the kids’ drawings, we are create facial animation with Adobe Photoshop, reflecting the leading human emotions, and we integrated an emotion recognition functionality. We are also implementing a set of lesson to be executed by the robot, following the Course 2 of code.org, and a set of interative games, and deploying a cloud-based structure to manage its intelligent and affective interaction.

 

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The research work of Cristina Gena benefited from the following application researches.

In Personalized Television Services (2000-2002), in cooperation with Telecom Italia Lab, the main goal of the project has been the definition of personalization techniques for the customization of the future television services and the exploitation of such techniques within a prototype system for the generation of personalized Electronic Program Guides (EPGs).

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In mastroCaronte (2000-2002), in cooperation with Fiat and Magneti Marelli, the problem of adaptive interaction on-board vehicles has been studied and experimented.

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In Acqua  (2003-2004), Intelligent Support to Retrieving Hydric Resources Data, in cooperation with Regione Piemonte (Piedmont Region), we have investigated the exploitation of minimalistic Adaptive Hypermedia techniques to enhance the interaction with the user without overloading the Web sites too much.

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In Ubiquito (2004-2006), in cooperation with CSP (https://www.csp.it/), we have developed a Web-based system that acts as an expert tourist guide for mobile users, filters the information and delivers it in the most appropriate way, depending on the device being used and on the interaction context.

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In ICITY (2006-2008), in cooperation with the Municipality of Turin and CSP (https://www.csp.it/) the integration of Web2.0, tagging and adaptation has been studied and experimented in the area of access to cultural heritage (see https://icity.di.unito.it/). In DynamicTV (2007-2009), with Telecom Italia, the same issues have been studied and experimented in the area of new Television paradigms.

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In DramaTour (2005-2006), sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, a character-based guide for a historical site on mobile device has been developed and evaluated during a real exhibition. This methodology puts together artificial intelligence techniques, such as an ontology-based knowledge base, and virtual storytelling.
See https://www.dramatour.unito.it/home.php

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In eTourism-ContexAware Systems (2006-2008), a project in cooperation with Telecom Italia, we have studied the integration of Semantic Web and Context Awareness techniques.

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In PRIN (Research Projects of significant National Interest, funded by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research) 2005 on Adaptive, Context-aware and Multimedia Guides for Mobile Devices, a project coordinated by prof. Chittaro, University of Udine, the Turin unit has implemented a semantic mobile guide for cultural events.

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In ICT Converging Technologies 2008 - PIEMONTE (People Interaction with Enhanced Multimodal Objects for a New Territory Experience) a 3-years project funded by Piedmont Region and in cooperation with Telecom Italia, Slow Food, and the University of Gastronomic Science, we have developed a suite of applications based on a framework for creating augmented environments including a social web of people and intelligent things: targeted to outdoor environments and eno-gastronomy domain, the applications aim to transform a region into a smart environment sharing its cultural heritage with people. Using the applications people can interact with intelligent, social things (e.g., bottles of wine, etc.), listen to their stories and contribute with user-generated content.
See https://www.piemonte.di.unito.it/

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The Strattour – Lavoro Interactive project - in cooperation with the  Agenzia Piemonte Lavoro (Piedmont Job Agency) in the context of  the  Strattour strategic project, involving the regions of Piedmont, Liguria, Valle d’Aosta and Rhône-Alpes et Alpes-Provence-Cote d’Azur, part of the “ALCotra” cross-border cooperation program between Italy and France for the period 2007 – 2013 - has developed an on-line recruitment service based on case-based reasoning approaches and tag recommendation for enhancing the match-making between job offers and possible candidates.  
See https://www.lavorointeractive.eu


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Cristina Gena has been scientific coordinator for the usability and interaction design aspects of a consulting and research project for the Valle d’Aosta Region (2009) for a study regarding the evaluation of the usability of the Valle d’Aosta Region main web site and its Intranet services.
See  https://www.regione.vda.it

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In 2011 she has been the scientific coordinator for the usability and interaction design aspects for the research project 150 Digit  (sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research), a web 2.0 portal designed for the publicity and dissemination of the exhibitions set up for the celebration of the 150 years of Italian unity. Targeted at schools, 150 Digit encourages the active participation of the users to the classification (in terms of tagging) of the exhibition contents and to the creation of new contents. Content items and tags are recommended as well using both the same semantic strategy and collaborative filtering approaches. As part of the user involvement, 150 Digit features a 3D visit of the exhibitions, where the users can navigate the reconstruction of the exhibitions through a specifically developed web-plugin.
See https://www.150digit.it


PROJECT RESPONSIBILITY

She has been scientific coordinator of a consulting and research project for the Valle d’Aosta Region (2011).  The project was aimed at carrying out a study for analyzing and redefining the purpose and the logic of the Partout web portal, a public administration web portal offering a set of services for local citizens.
See https://www.partout.it/

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In 2011 she has been project leader of the research unit of the 3DVRS suite project  (a Smart Technologies project, funded by the Piedmont Region) for the prototype development of simulators in virtual reality stereoscopic where it is needed to simulate accidents of various kinds to design the necessary countermeasures. The research unit has developed the interaction design strategies, and the mock up interfaces to configure the simulators, in addition to having carried out the usability evaluations.

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From June 2012 she is the project leader of the research unit for the  ReAL CODE project, a 24 months research project funded by Piedmont Region.  ReAL CODE wants to create the conditions for a targeted and intelligent distribution of digital creative contents with respect to the recipients of the work (final or brokers). The aim is to build an open, decentralized and interoperable solution for the formal and semantic description of contents, which software may insist on for the collection, the analysis, the processing and the recommendation of such contents.
See https://www.realcode.it


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From February 2013 she is scientific coordinator of the consulting and research project for the Municipality of Turin (Education Policies Department) for the redesign and the re-implantation of the StudyInTorino web site, according to a user-centered design approach involving final users in every step and with the goal of revising the usability, accessibility, and information architecture aspects.
See https://www.studyintorino.it/

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From July 2013 she is scientific coordinator of the consulting and research project for the Municipality of Turin (Education Policies Department) concerning the design of new interaction strategies, the user-system interaction re-design and the re-implementation in a client-server perspective of the Arianna software that, through a set of aptitude tests, allows to obtain the personal profile of individual students regarding their strengths, weaknesses, potentials useful to orientate them towards the right high school choice.
See https://www.comune.torino.it/servizieducativi/cosp/index.htm

 

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Dall'aprile al giugno 2015 sono stata il responsabile scientifico della Convenzione tra la Società per la gestione dell' Incubatore di Imprese e per il Trasferimento Tecnologico dell' Università degli Studi di Torino Scarl - 2i3T e l’Università di Torino (Dipartimento di Informatica) per “Studio e Analisi di usabilità per il progetto RightTVforKids”