About my research

My main area of research is Human-Computer Interaction. My work in this area for more than 10 years, has focused on finding ways to ease the access to interactive systems for populations with special needs, permanent or temporary. This has led me to work with unique populations, including older adults, visually impaired or children with autism spectrum disorder. My approach to this challenging problem has evolved to believing that each user is unique, and worthy of an interface adequate to her or his abilities. I have addressed this position from two, complementary, technological and scientific solutions: adaptation and multimodality. By researching adaptive systems, I look for ways to make a system learn about who is using it, and with that knowledge change its behaviour to better meet her or his unique needs. By researching multimodality, I look for ways to communicate with users through the most appropriate channels for them, both to transmit as well as to receive information.

Check my publications and research projects.

Publications

Books and journals (edited)

Select the year: All | 2019 | 2015 | 2013 | 2011

2019

Fang Chen, Carlos Duarte, Wai-Tat Fu, (Eds.) "ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) - Special Issue on Highlights of ACM Intelligent User Interface (IUI) 2017", Guest Editor for TiiS, Volume 9, Issue 2-3, ACM, 2019

Journal articles

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2023

Beatriz Martins, Carlos Duarte, "A large-scale web accessibility analysis considering technology adoption", Universal Access in the Information Society (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s10209-023-01010-0

Book chapters

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2019

Carlos Duarte, Manuel J. Fonseca, "Multimedia Accessibility", In: Yesilada Y., Harper S. (eds) Web Accessibility. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London, 2019. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4471-7440-0_25 [pre-print]

Carlos Duarte, José Coelho, "Design of Social Network Services for and with Older Adults", In: Neves B., Vetere F. (eds) Ageing and Digital Technology. Springer, Singapore, 2019. doi: 10.1007/978-981-13-3693-5_18

Conference and workshop publications

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2022

Letícia Seixas Pereira, José Coelho, André Rodrigues, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro, Carlos Duarte, "Authoring accessible media content on social networks", In ASSETS '22: The 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility Proceedings, 2022. doi: 10.1145/3517428.3544882 [pre-print]

Cláudia Faria, Rafael Gaspar, Diana Boaventura, Carlos Duarte, "ROTEIRO ENTRE MARÉS: An App for the Promotion of Ocean Literacy", In EDULEARN22 Proceedings, p. 1572, 2022. doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2022.0415

Thesis

2008

Carlos Duarte, “Design and Evaluation of Adaptive Multimodal Systems”, PhD Thesis, University of Lisbon, 2008.

Technical Reports

2005

Miguel Rodrigues, Luís Carriço, Carlos Duarte,"Finding New Ways to Read Digital Talking Books", Technical Report DI/FCUL TR 05-13, Department of Informatics, University of Lisbon, 2005

Research Projects

Ongoing

WAI-CooP (H2020/2021 - Grant Agreement 101004794) supports implementation of the international standards for digital accessibility through: 1) Establishing vendor-neutral overview on available training, tools, and resources internationally; 2) Analyzing technological advancements and coordinating with relevant research and development; 3) Providing opportunities for key stakeholders to share resources and to exchange best practices.

LEAD-ME (Cost Action CA19142) aims to help European stakeholders in the field of Media Accessibility to meet legal milestones requested by European legislation. Researchers, engineers and scholars as well as businesses and policy makers will be empowered by LEAD-ME with a common and unique platform which will collect, create, and disseminate innovative technologies and solutions, best practices and guidelines.

Past projects

SONAAR (Grant Agreement LC-01409741) goal is to prototype a mechanism capable of increasing the amount of accessible user-generated content available on social networks on mobile and desktop platforms. To achieve its major goal, SONAAR aims to facilitate authoring of accessible content, deploy that content on multiple platforms, ensure the authoring process is accessible and engage users in creating accessible content.

WAI-Tools (H2020/2017 - Grant Agreement 780057) drives web accessibility evaluation and repair through: 1) Building on the on-going W3C efforts on WCAG Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT); 2) Ensuring consistent accuracy across automated, semi-automated, and manual testing; 3) Pursuing leading edge technologies testing, including dynamic and mobile applications; 4) Leveraging the existing market of commercial, free, and open source evaluation tools; 5) Demonstrating large-scale accessibility monitoring built on open standards and tools.

PersonAAL (AAL-2014) aims at extending the time older people can live in their home environment by increasing their autonomy and assisting them in carrying out activities of daily living by means of intelligent and intuitive web applications enabling users to receive personalized and context-dependent assistance directly in their own homes with the goal to improve quality of life and decrease healthcare delivery cost.

ALHTOUR - Assisted Living Technologies for the Health Tourism Sector (H2020-TWINN-2015, Reference 692311) intends to step up and stimulate scientific excellence and the capacity for innovation in technologies for independent living, applied to the health tourism industry. In particular, the project links the University of Lisbon with three internationally leading research Institutions through a knowledge transfer process to prepare for the set-up of a ‘Health Tourism Living Lab’ in the Lisbon area, identified as a key driver for territorial development.

ASTARTE (FP7-ENV2013 6.4-3, Grant no. 603839) is organized to foster tsunami resilience in Europe, through innovative research on scientific problems critical to enhance forecast skills in terms of sources, propagation and impact. My contribution centers on the design of a mobile application supporting the search and rescue opperations, through ad-hoc networks and inconspicuous data gathering.

AMBIENTE DE TAREFAS SIMULADAS PARA AVALIAÇÃO DE SISTEMAS COLABORATIVOS (FCT PTDC/EIA-EIA/117058/2010) aims to: 1) Develop and validate a conceptual framework for conducting laboratory experiments with collaborative systems; and 2) Implement and validate a computational tool supporting these experiments.

GUIDE - Gentle User Interfaces for Disabled and Elderly users (FP7/2007-2013 Grant no. 248893) run from 2010 to 2013. The main goal of the GUIDE project was to develop software tools for Smart TV developers in order to support them in making their services more accessible and personalisable, both at design time as well as during runtime. The basic approach of GUIDE was based on user-centred design, multi-modal interaction, user modelling and profile-based UI adaptation.

S4S - Smartphones for Seniors (QREN) run from 2011 to 2013. The first goal of this project was to enable better and more adapted communication mechanisms to the elderly, by taking advantage of the Windows Phone 7 new user interfaces and including more advanced apps such as video conferencing, chatting and social networking integration (such as Facebook and Twitter).

VISTA - Vision based touch interaction anywhere (FCT PTDC/EIA-EIA/105062/2008) run from 2010 to 2012. The VISTA project intended to contribute to the advancement of the state of the art in two aspects related to the topic of gestural interaction: 1) the study of the interaction with gesture controlled interactive surfaces, with or without physical contact, in scenarios with one or more surfaces; 2) find a low computational cost solution for hands and fingers tracking, allowing the deployment of gestural interaction solutions characterized by low hardware resources.

ACCESSIBLE - Accessibility Assessment Simulation Environment for New Applications Design and Development (FP7/2007-2013 Grant no. 224145) run from 2008 to 2012. ACCESSIBLE exploited the technologies behind the expansion of accessibility tools and standardisation methodologies, in order to provide an integrated simulation assessment environment for supporting the production of accessible software applications mobile or not.

ARIA - Ambient-assisted Reading Interfaces for the Ageing-society (FCT PTDC/EIA-EIA/105305/2008) run from 2010 to 2012. This project proposed to study the cognitive processes involved in reading for older adults, and develop an ambient-assisted reading framework targeted for elderly people and communities.

QualWeb - Large Scale Web Accessibility Evaluations (FCT PTDC/EIA-EIA/105079/2008) run from 2010 to 2012. With QualWeb, we proposed the characterisation of the Portuguese Web from an accessibility point-of-view. This characterisation provided answers to the current state of accessibility of the Portuguese Web both from general and personalised points-of-view (e.g., how accessible is for a blind person vs. for a deaf person). Based on this characterisation we proposed a set of accessibility services for end users, including the visualisation of the different properties obtained for the characterisation process, as well as a Web search service on top of the Portuguese Web that takes into account accessibility into Web page ranking processes.

InSiThe - In-Situ Therapy Support (FCT PTDC/EIA-EIA/103676/2008) run from 2010 to 2012. This project aimed at providing a solution for mobile, time/space distributed, therapy sessions, complementing SCOPE and JoinTS projects. InSiThe expanded the Information and Communication (IC) platform of JoinTS, to cope with remote and outdoors settings. It contributed to a definitive set of models, a specification language and an IC platform that covered Cognitive Based Therapy in all scenarios.

JoinTS - Joint Psychological Therapy Support (FCT POSC/EIA/62473/2004) run from 2006 to 2008. JoinTS is a project that aimed at providing extended support to psychotherapy processes that focus patients’ autonomy, activity and self-regulation. It provided coverage of the patient centred activities through different settings and utilizing emerging technologies. The computational support also aimed at facilitating group therapy and therapist collaboration.

RiCoBA - Rich Content Books for All (FCT POSC/EIA/61042/2004) run from 2005 to 2007. RiCoBA aimed at making books more accessible and appealing to different audiences. The goals were to support rich Digital Talking Book (DTB) generation, through the development of a production framework to assist in the building and enriching of the books, and rich DTB playback, by developing tools for non-visual platforms, and tools that adapt the book presentation and interaction, reacting to changes in the user, playback devices, and environment.

SCOPE - Supporting Cognition Outlines on Psychological Evaluation (FCT POSI/SRI/44247/2002) run from 2002 to 2004. SCOPE main objective was the definition of computer support for psychological assessment, diagnosis and therapy processes. SCOPE supported psychotherapy processes through the use of adequate cognitive mapping tools, based on, at the time, emerging interaction techniques and systems and on new and adaptive visualization approaches, that naturally integrate the interview, analysis and diagnosis process. The computational support aimed at helping therapists delineate the cognitive organization and the dysfunctional cognitive processes of the patient, through cognitive and narrative approaches; as well as the patients work throughout the entire therapy process.

IPSOM, Indexação, Integração e Pesquisa de Som em Documentos Multimédia (FCT POSI/PLP/34252/1999) run from 2001 to 2003. The goals of the IPSOM project were the indexing, integration and retrieval of sound in multimedia documents, applied to spoken books. With this project, we intended to broaden and improve the use of the collection of spoken books of Biblioteca Nacional (The National Library). On one hand, making them available in digital format simplified their access to a potentially much broader community of users. On the other hand, through the alignment between the written and spoken representation, allowing the indexing and retrieval of words, sets of words or topics, the project opened new horizons for the use of these documents.