Dr.  Fabio Paterno

Fabio Paternò is Research Director at C.N.R.-ISTI in Pisa where he founded and leads the Laboratory on Human Interfaces in Information Systems.

He developed the ConcurTaskTrees notation for specifying task models and has also designed an associated environment (CTTE) to support the development and analysis of task models specified through  this notation, which has been used in various industries and universities. The tool has been applied in several application domains (including ERP, interactive safety-critical systems).

He has also been working on the design of tools to support designers of multi-device, multi-modal interactive applications starting with user interface logical descriptions, such as MultiModal TERESA and MARIAE. Such tools are associated with languages for user interface logical descriptions.

He has also been working on methods and automatic support for usability evaluation. This work has produced a number of tools that perform their intelligent analyses of client-side logs of user sessions, detected in both stationary and mobile devices. He also turned his attention to how to integrate usability and accessibility issues, a research area for which he supervised a blind Ph.D. student, now permanent researcher in his laboratory. In this area, research work has also been dedicated to the design of innovative tools for checking accessibility and usability guidelines.

A considerable amount of work has also been dedicated to mobile guides. Various solutions for such guides have been designed, some in collaboration with local museums, which exploit various technologies for location awareness and multimodal interaction. One of the main recent area is design and tools for multi-device user interfaces, investigating novel solutions for service front-ends adaptation, distributed user interfaces and their migration to support mobile users.

In recent years, his research interests have broadened to include User Interface Software and Tools for Ubiquitous Environments, Methods and Tools for Supporting User Experience Evaluation, Accessibility, Adaptation in Service Front-Ends, Model-Based Design of Interactive Systems, End-User Development, and Design of User Interfaces for Safety Critical Interactive Systems. He has published more than two hundred thirty papers in refereed international conferences or journals.

He has been the scientific coordinator of five EU projects (MEFISTO, GUITARE, EUD-Net, CAMELEON, OPEN) and one of the main investigators in several others (such as ADVISES, MAUSE, SIMILAR, SERVFACE, SERENOA, SMARCOS).  

He has been a member of the Programme Committee of the main international HCI conferences, including Papers Co-Chair of the ACM CHI 2000 conference , IFIP INTERACT 2003 and IFIP INTERACT 2005. He chaired   various other events including Mobile HCI 2002, ACM EICS 2011 conference, Ambient Intelligence 2012, and ACM EICS 2014 Conference. He is co-chair of Mobile HCI 2016.

He represents Italy in the IFIP Technical Committee 13 on Human Computer Interaction, and has been the chair of IFIP WG 2.7/13.4 on User Interface Engineering and a member of WG 13.2 and WG 13.3, and chaired the ACM SIGCHI Italy (from 2000 to 2004). He was appointed ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2009 and was awarded the IFIP Silver Core in 2013.

He has taught in various universities in Italy and abroad, given tutorials in many international conferences and talks in various research centers.

• Design and Adaptation for Cross-Device, Context-dependent User Interfaces
  This course  aims to help user interface designers and developers to understand the issues involved in multi-device, context-dependent interactive applications, which can be accessed through...
• End-User Development: an Emerging Field for Empowering People
  End-User Development is a set of methods, techniques, and tools that allow users of software systems, who are acting as non-professional software developers, at some point to create, modify or...
• Model-based User Interface Design: Where we are, Where we are headed
  Model-based approaches  represent the intersection between user interface design and more systematic approaches by providing designers with the means to represent and manipulate...
• The role of automatic tool support in usability and accessibility evaluation of Web applications
  Evaluation is an increasingly important part of the user interface design process. However, evaluation can be expensive in terms of time and human resources, and automation is therefore a...