The future of communication
I guess this could be the last post in the blog (probably for a very long time). Even simpler to read and understand
Ramblings by Paolo on Web2.0, Wikipedia, Social Networking, Trust, Reputation, …
Latest posts
Italy as best country in believing climate change is a global emergency
With 1.2 million respondents, the Peoples’ Climate Vote (2020/2021) is the largest survey of public opinion on climate change ever conducted (50 countries). People were asked about their belief in the climate emergency and which policies, across six areas energy, economy, transportation, farms and food, protecting people, and nature – that they would like [ ]
I’m in the world’s top 2% scientists ;)
I ve been informed I m in the Stanford list of world s top 2% scientists. Wow! In reality, I m in the list that appears in a paper titled Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators published on Plos Biology on October 16, 2020 by three authors and the first author is affiliated with Stanford University. Anyway [ ]
The impact of user interface on young children’s computational thinking. Better tangible (wood!) or non-tangible (screen)?
I read The impact of user interface on young children’s computational thinking (pdf) by Sullivan, Bers, Pugnali (2017). Wonderful paper! Authors compare a tangible interface to robotics programming and a non-tangible interface. The tangible interface is KIBO, a robotic kit programmed with wooden blocks, basically making Scratch physical. (I totally love KIBO, so I m biased [ ]
Cool paper “written/drawn” as a comic
The Emerging Genre of Data Comics is an article that was published in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, June 2017 but it is actually a comic. Cool!
A walk on the CHIld side: our CHI paper got a Honourable Mention award!
Our paper A Walk on the Child Side: Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility was accepted at CHI 2019 and also got a Honourable Mention. Wow! You can read the paper and download the pdf at the paper page. Enjoy!
Google UX Designers demystify Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Josh Lovejoy @jdlovejoy, in the first minutes of this video about human-centered machine learning, explains artificial intelligence is really anything where there is an automated decision being made and cites, as examples, a toaster and automatic doors. Yes, your toaster is AI! And then what s distinct about machine learning as a subset of AI is [ ]
Gallery of XKCD and other Python matplotlib styles
I m reading the wonderful Python Data Science Handbook by Jake VanderPlas, a book written entirely as Jupyter notebooks! And got excited about matplotlib styles but XKCD style was missing so I modified a bit the code for rendering the different styles to include it. Below a small part of the gallery (XKCD style is the [ ]
3 open positions on design thinking available in Trento!
The new adventure I was mentioning few days ago is the Design Research Lab, a joint initiative of University of Trento, Confindustria, Art Institute Artigianelli and Bruno Kessler Foundation. We are currently recruiting and now there are 3 open positions as research fellow in the Design Research Lab. The duration of the contract is for [ ]
Design thinking and how it transformed Airbnb from failing startup to billion-dollar business
Very interesting conversation with Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb. I share some insights I got by watching the 2013 video. First insight: they were 3 founders in California with a stagnating company (Airbnb), they could have kept staying in their office trying to improve the site, write more software code and instead what did they [ ]
Design Thinking: Norman and I (and the stupid question)
I m starting a new adventure and it is about service design and design thinking, so I thought I could start looking at what Don Norman said about design thinking, right? In 2010 Norman labelled design thinking as a powerful but false myth with questions such as Why should we perpetuate such nonsensical, erroneous thinking? and [ ]
Which language edition of Wikipedia has more registered women?
A paper of mine published in 2014 started with this simple (but interesting, I think) question ;) As you might know, Wikipedia is not available only in English but there are almost 300 Wikipedias written in other languages. So what we did? We computed the percentage of females and males among registered users on 289 [ ]
Manypedia presented at Wikisym
I uploaded on slideshare the presentation I gave time ago at Wikisym 2012. It is embedded below. There is a comparison of Points of View across different wikis (such as ecured.cu, the Cuban government official wiki, and Conservapedia, Anarchopedia, veganpedia, ) and a comparisons of the same page across different language Wikipedias thanks to Manypedia [ ]
Which Wikipedia pages are edited mainly by females?
Some time ago we developed Wikitrip, a web tool which shows the world location of editors of a chosen Wikipedia page and also the gender of editors, i.e. how many edits were made by males and females. We released Wikitrip as open source on github and we also deployed 3 live APIs: api.php (various stats [ ]
Models of economic production, Encarta vs Wikipedia, and sober economists
An excerpt from Dan Pink s TED talk The surprising science of motivation The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, all the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget [ ]