The last few years have seen the flourishing of Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs) both in academia and as off-the-shelf products. These tools allow users to self-regulate their technology use. The two screenshots, for example, are taken from Apple Screen Time, an app available on every iOS smartphone. It allows users to monitor time spent and smartphone pickups, with the possibility of defining interventions like usage timers and lock-out mechanisms for specific applications.

While these emerging technologies for behavior change hold great promise to support people’s digital wellbeing, we still have a limited understanding of their real effectiveness, as well as of how to best design and evaluate them.

To close these gaps, we conducted a systematic literature review and a meta-analysis of current work on tools for digital self-control. Our analysis was published on the ACM Trasactions on Computer-Human Interaction, and surfaced motivations, strategies, design choices, and challenges that characterize the design, development, and evaluation of DSCTs.

On June 6-8, 2023, the e-Lite group will attend (in person) the 9th International Symposium on End-User Development (IS-EUD 2023) in Cagliari, Italy.

Alberto Monge Roffarello and Tommaso Calò will present two papers (one regular and one short) on June 7, while Luigi De Russis will chair the "Demo and Work-in-progress" session on June 8 (15:20-16:35).

The regular paper presents a voice-based approach to define trigger-action rules in smart environments. The short paper, instead, is on end-user website generators through Large Language Models (LLMs).

Luca Mannella had participated in the 2nd PitchD event organized by the IEEE Student Branch of Politecnico di Torino in 2023. The PitchD was scheduled for May 24, 2023, from 11:00 to 12:00, in the conference room Maxwell (fifth floor of the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications) at Politecnico di Torino.

Luca's 15-minute presentation, entitled "Securing the Connected Home: Extending the MUD Architecture for Smart Home Gateways", provided insights into the recent research activities conducted by the research group on the cybersecurity of IoT systems, with a specific focus on smart homes.

Quarta edizione della lezione‑spettacolo, realizzata grazie a Just the Woman I Am, un’iniziativa che coinvolge decine di migliaia di persone accentrando l’attenzione sulla salute della donna, in ambito di prevenzione oncologica ma non solo, promossa dal CUS Torino, assieme all’Università di Torino e al Politecnico di Torino.

La lezione‑spettacolo 2023 "Donne libere di vivere" pone ancora e sempre la donna al centro, così come ogni anno si parte con una corsa/camminata in occasione della Festa della Donna, con l'obiettivo di ricordare il ruolo fondamentale della conoscenza e di sottolineare che quella stessa conoscenza può coinvolgerci con leggerezza, persino con divertimento.

On April 26, Mauricio Verano and I presented our work "The Art of Creating Code-Based Artworks" in the Late-Breaking Work session at ACM CHI (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) 2023, the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction.

Our work stems from the fact that software has become an artistic medium, and programming with artistic purposes has been portrayed under the umbrella term Creative Coding: a discovery-based process consisting of exploration, iteration, and reflection, where code is used as the primary medium to create a wide range of media artifacts designed for an artistic context. Concerning traditional programming, Creative Coding has a different development process and poses distinctive challenges, technically and conceptually.

On April 26, 2023, Alberto presented the paper "Defining and Identifying Attention Capture Damaging Patterns in Digital Interfaces" in the "Digital Wellbeing" session at ACM CHI 2023, the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. The paper is a collaboration between the e-Lite group and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Santa Clara University, CA (USA).

Our work is motivated by the growing public discussion and research attention on the negative aspects of overusing technology. We all know that digital services like social media and video games often capture us, even against our will. In the paper, we investigated how these digital services can capture our attention so much and, in particular, if this attention-capture can be created by design.

The University of Salerno invited Luigi De Russis to have a seminar on development and the Internet of Things, from a Human-Computer Interaction perspective.

The talk, entitled "Development + IoT = ?", took place on May 3, 2023, from 14:00 to 16:00 in room F8 in the Computer Science building of the university.

We are happy to announce that we have one full paper and a Late-Breaking Work (LBW) accepted at ACM CHI 2023, the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. CHI 2023 will be held next week (April 23-28) in Hamburg (Germany) and online.

Luigi, Alberto, Juan, and Tommaso will attend the conference in person. If you meet any of us, say "hello": we're always happy to chat! 😊

The paper is about digital wellbeing and attention-capture damaging patterns, while the LBW presents a first step towards better understanding creative coders' needs.

La Città di Torino partecipa al sistema integrato a livello nazionale dei Poli ZeroSei sui servizi educativi nella fascia prescolare.

Nell'ambito di una serie di workshop che anticipano il Forum Nazionale Poli ZeroSei, lunedì 13/03 Fulvio Corno terrà un intervento sul tema delle tecnologie in campo educativo.

The e-Lite research group is organizing a special session focused on Cybersecurity and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The poster of the special session, with all the relevant information, is available at the following link: https://2023.splitech.org/assets/SS%20Cybersecurity.pdf