On July 15 and 16, the partners of the AccessCoVE project met for the 2nd plenary meeting of the project (following the kick-off meeting in Thessaloniki in September 2023, and many on-line meetings).

The partners were hosted for two very dense days in the Ciminiera Meeting Room at the Department of Control and Computer Engineering, in Politecnico di Torino. The partners revised the different Workpackages and pending activities, and planned a significant number of activities for the next Autumn.

On June 26, I presented the work "Empowering Users: End User Development for Mobile Applications Privacy Management" at the first International Workshop on Trusted Computing and Artificial Intelligence applied to Cybersecurity, held in Paris.

Smartphones have become integral to everyday life, offering numerous benefits but also raising significant privacy and security concerns. Users often face challenges managing app permissions and protecting personal data due to the complexity of existing smartphone operating system settings. Our research addresses these issues by introducing Privacy Manager, a mobile application designed for Android devices that employs an End-User Development (EUD) approach.

On June 2024, 2024, Luigi De Russis joined (online) the closing and awards ceremony at the Intelligent Environments (IE) 2024 conference to receive the Most Influential Paper Award for the 2018 paper entitled "'Hey Siri, do you understand me?': Virtual Assistants and Dysarthria".

On June 4-7, 2024, the e-Lite group will attend (in person) the 17th International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI 2024) in Arenzano, Italy.

The group will organize a workshop entitled "Digital Wellbeing for Teens: Designing Educational Systems (DIGI-Teens 2024)" in the morning of Tuesday, 4 June as part of a PRIN 2022 research project. Luigi De Russis, Alberto Monge Roffarello, Luca Scibetta e Massimiliano Pellegrino will join the workshop (and the entire conference).

Massimiliano Pellegrino will present the short paper "Digital Wellbeing Lens: Design Interfaces That Respect User Attention" on Friday, 7 June at 12:00 (session: Design).

On Friday, June 14, 2024, from 10:00 to 11:00, Andrea Bianchi from Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) will hold a seminar entitled "If All You Have is a Hammer": Designing Digitally Augmented Physical Tools. The seminar will be in Sala Ciminiera (5th floor of the DAUIN).

The workshop Digital Wellbeing for Teens - Designing Educational Systems (DIGI-Teens), to be held on June 3-4, 2024, at Arenzano, Italy is currently accepting contributions!

DIGI-Teens is an AVI 2024 workshop that aims to establish a venue for the academic and industrial communities to discuss ongoing research and ideas at the intersection of digital wellbeing and education, aiming to promote the development of strategies and tools to "teach" users – particularly children and teenagers – to use technology more meaningfully and consciously.

On March 4, 2024, Politecnico di Torino's students will start the second semester for this academic year, after the exam session.

Members of the e-Lite group teach one elective and three mandatory courses. Such courses are offered in different bachelors' and masters' degrees. Courses' topics include web applications, programming techniques, and digital wellbeing.

People nowadays have access to Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs) that can help them manage their technology use. These tools offer features such as timers and the ability to disable distracting functionalities like recommendations and newsfeeds. However, researchers have identified several limitations with existing DSCTs, ranging from theoretical gaps to an overreliance on users' self-monitoring abilities.

In our work, we tried to overcome such limits and effectively support people in regaining control over smartphone use in the long term, focusing on teaching users how to relate better with technology, so that they can break unwanted smartphone habits and establish alternative behaviors without being forced to use a supportive tool forever.

Specifically, we designed, implemented, and evaluated StepByStep, a novel mobile DSCT that proactively assists users in learning how to regulate smartphone use.

By monitoring user's behavior, the app suggests new personalized learning paths composed of adaptable and continuously variable interventions to reduce and change unwanted behaviors with the smartphone. These paths can be at phone or app-level, and may be used to shape different behaviors, from avoiding using the smartphone in specific circumstances to using an app for an established amount of time. The main idea behind a learning path, in particular, is to progressively reduce the degree of support of the tool - i.e., the intensity of the associated intervention - based on user's achievements, until the user acquires a sufficient level of independence, i.e., it is able to sustain the new behavior without the help of the tool. To this end, StepByStep follows a gamification approach through which the intensity of an intervention is divided into four different levels. Users can gain points and advance in levels, i.e., by receiving less support, if they consistently respect the intervention with its current intensity for a sufficient amount of time. However, they can also lose points and downgrade to previous levels, i.e., by receiving more support, if they consistently fail to respect the intervention with its current intensity.

Luca Mannella has recently co-authored a new research article titled "Security at the Edge for Resource-Limited IoT Devices", in the special issue "Emerging IoT Technologies for Smart Environments, 3rd Edition" of MDPI Sensors. This research is a collaborative effort with Daniele Canavese (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse), Leonardo Regano (Università degli Studi di Cagliari), and Cataldo Basile (TORSEC research group, DAUIN, Politecnico di Torino).

The proliferation of IoT devices (14.4 billion active endpoints at the end of 2022) has introduced security vulnerabilities stemming from limited computing power, absence of timely security updates, and intrinsic design flaws. This paper aims to improve the security of IoT devices presenting the IoT Proxy, a modular component crafted to enhance security in resource-limited IoT scenarios. At its core, the IoT Proxy is crafted to externalize security-related functions from IoT devices, mitigating limitations arising from constrained computing power. This is achieved through a secure network gateway equipped with diverse Virtual Network Security Functions (VNSFs), allowing for adaptability and scalability.

The "Global MOOC and Online Education Alliance" is an international alliance for exchange and cooperation of higher education institutions, to address digital education challenges and to implement practical policies in local communities and around the world. It is a small and diverse group of 17 world-leading universities and 3 online education platforms from across 14 countries in all 6 continents and speaks 10 different languages, and was initiated by Tsinghua University in 2020.

On December 14-16, the Global MOOC Alliance organized its annual conference, hosted by Politecnico di Milano, under the theme Reconstruction of Future Universities and Education Driven by Artificial Intelligence. On December 15, during the Plenary Session, Fulvio Corno gave a short keynote speech about Students’ Digital Twins for open exploration of AI features, where he outlined a possible strategy for a Technical University such as Politecnico di Torino, to leverage their skills and resources to tackle the continuous evolution of AI tools and solutions, in order to provide innovative services to the education community, by elaborating a concept of an AI Playground.