Mauro Cherubini
portrait

TID, Telefónica Research, via Augusta 177, Barcelona, Spain
phone +39-06-9333335; mobile +39-388-3636356


http://people.epfl.ch/mauro.cherubini/ − http://www.media.mit.edu/~mauroc/

skype MauroCher My status

blog http://www.i-cherubini.it/mauro/blog/

linkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/martigan

Short biography

After a year in the department of Physics, I obtained a degree in Educational Studies from the third University of Rome, RomaTre. I graduated in 2001, with a thesis on the Usability of the Children's Internet Sites.
I worked for two and a half years as a research assistant at the Media Lab Europe (MLE), in Ireland, under the supervision of Dr. Carol Strohecker. During this time, I had several study visits at the MIT Media Lab in Boston, where I worked with Bakhtiar Mikhak. I obtained a Master of Arts by Research from St. Patrick's College, Dublin City University, in 2004. My master thesis documented the work I conducted at MLE on Microworlds for Ecology Explorations.
In 2004, I joined the CRAFT laboratory, at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne EPFL, under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Dillenbourg. At EPFL, I conducted research on collaborative annotations of maps and remote gesturing. In June 2008, I was conferred a doctorate in Computer Science (PhD).
In my former life, I founded an Non-Governmental Organization, Misericordia di Ariccia, to sustain enderly and autistic children in the region south of Rome, Italy.

Research interests

My primary research interests are at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human learning. I seek to design systems that enable people to be better connected and in more flexible and dynamic ways. I am particularly interested in how to empower people through new technology and in giving them the opportunity to better participate in collective initiatives.
I believe this work is important as we live in increasingly complex communities where people feel more and more alienated and where the sense of `public' is impoverished. Ironically, technology both provides new opportunities for communication and collaboration and takes them away, with potential implications for public life.

Education

  • ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FEDERALE DE LAUSANNE (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
    http://craft.epfl.ch (2003 — present)

    Researcher, PhD Candidate

  • MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE of TECHNOLOGY (MIT), Boston, USA,
    http://www.media.mit.edu (2001 — 2003)

    Certificate of Research Excellence

  • ST. PATRICK'S COLLEGE, DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY, Dublin, Ireland
    http://www.spd.dcu.ie (2001 — 2003)

    Master of Arts by Research in Education (M.A.)

  • ROMATRE UNIVERSITY, Faculty of Educational Studies, Rome, Italy
    http://www.uniroma3.it (1997 — 2001)

    Bachelor degree in Education (Bs.Ed.), with honors

  • TOR VERGATA UNIVERSITY, Rome, Italy
    http://www.uniroma2.it (1996 — 1997)

    First year in the faculty of Physics

  • TECHNICAL INSTITUTE "E. Fermi", Frascati, Rome, Italy
    http://www.fermifrascati.it/ (1991 — 1996)

    High School degree in Environmental Sciences

Academic Publications

Peer-reviewed journals

  • M. Cherubini, H. Gash and T.J.J. McCloughlin The Digital Seed: An interactive toy for investigating plant growth and the generalized plant life cycle., Journal of Biological Education, Institute of Biology Press, London, 2008 (in press)

Edited Publications

  • P. Dillenbourg, J. Huang and M. Cherubini. (eds.) Interactive Furniture Supporting Collaborative Work, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning series, Springer, London, 2008 (in press)

Conferences/Workshops

  • M. Cherubini, M.-A. Nüssli, and P. Dillenbourg. Deixis and gaze in collaborative work at a distance (over a shared map): a computational model to detect misunderstandings. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA2008) (Savannah, GA, USA, March 26-28 2008), Association for Computing Machinery, ACM Press. [PDF]

  • M. Cherubini, F. Hong, P. Dillenbourg, and F. Girardin. Ubiquitous collaborative annotations of mobile maps: how and why people might want to share geographical notes. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Collaborative Editing Systems (IWCES'07) (Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, November 4 2007). [PDF]
  • M. Cherubini, and P. Dillenbourg. The effects of explicit referencing in distance problem solving over shared maps. In GROUP '07: ACM 2007 International Conference on Supporting Group Work (Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, November 4-7 2007), Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 331-340. [PDF]
  • M. Cherubini, G. Venolia, and R. deLine. Building an ecologically-valid, large-scale diagram to help developers stay oriented in their code. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC'07) (Coeur d'Alène, Idaho, USA, September 23-27 2007), IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 157-160. [PDF]
  • M. Cherubini, G. Venolia, R. deLine and A. J. Ko. Let's Go to the Whiteboard: How and Why Software Developers Use Drawings. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI2007) (San Jose, CA, USA, April 28, May 3 2007), ACM Press, pp. 557-566. [PDF]
  • M. Cherubini, and J. van der Pol. Grounding is not shared understanding: Distinguishing grounding at an utterance and knowledge level. In CONTEXT’05, the Fifth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modelling and Using Context, Paris, France, July 5-8 2005. [PDF]
  • M. Cherubini. A collaborative ontology for ‘spatialised communication’. Position paper for the workshop ‘Potential of Cognitive Semantics for Ontologies’, part of FOIS2004, Torino, Italy, November, 3 2004. [PDF]
  • M. Cherubini, H. Gash, J. Rasmussen, and T. McCloughlin. DigitalSeed: An interactive toy for children's exploration of plant growth and life cycles. Interaction Design and Children, International Workshop, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, August 28-29, 2002. [PDF]
  • H. Gash, and M. Cherubini. A digital seed: designing a toy plant to facilitate cognitive growth. At the annual conference of the Psychological Society of Ireland, Waterford, November, 2002. [PDF]
  • N. Winters, M. Cherubini, and C. Strohecker. Biosphera: A Prototype Design for Learning about Multivariate Systems. CHI Designing for Learning Workshop, Ft. Lauredale, USA, April 2003. [PDF]

Reviews

  • M. Cherubini, and N. Nova. To Live or To Master the city, the citizen dilemma: some reflections on urban spaces fruition and on the possibility of change one's attitude , Imago Urbis, n. 2, Universitas de Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 2004. http://imagourbis.unq.edu.ar/ [PDF]

Theses

  • M. Cherubini. Annotations of Maps in Collaborative Work at a Distance. PhD thesis n.4116, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, June 2008, submitted.

  • M. Cherubini. Effects of 'spatialized' communication in tightly coupled work. Technical Report CRAFT-REPORT-2006-001, CRAFT - École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL, Ecublens, Station 1, CH-1015, Switzerland, 2006. [PDF]
  • M. Cherubini. Collaborative annotations of space in a mobile context: a computational model that integrates spatial information and communication. Thesis Proposal, CRAFT, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL, Ecublens, Station 1, CH-1015, Switzerland, 2005. [PDF]
  • M. Cherubini. Microworlds for ecology explorations: From DigitalSeed to Biosphera in fostering children’s understanding of plant biology. Master’s thesis, St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University, Ireland, May 2004. [PDF]
  • M. Cherubini. The Kid Factor, usability and ergonomy of children's internet sites. Graduation’s thesis, Università di RomaTre, Rome, Italy, July 2001. [PDF]

Portfolio

CodeMaps (2006)

Whiteboards and Code Maps

In the summer of 2006, Gina Venolia and Mauro Cherubini ran a series of surveys and interviews on why and how developers use visual depictions of their code. We found that diagrams that documented design decisions were often externalized in the temporary drawings and then subsequently lost. Most of the diagrams had a transient nature because of the high cost of changing whiteboard sketches to electronic renderings. Current visualization tools and the software development practices that we observed do not solve these issues, but these results suggest several directions for future research. Please see this working draft for details.

STAMPS (2005)

System for TAgging Messages, Post-Inferential Semantics

This work targets specifically a human activity that we defined as Collaborative Annotations of a Map in a mobile setting. In general, this can be seen as a form of `Spatialised' communication, which means that communication makes explicit usage of the geographical/physical context as referent to the message content. The goal of this study is to develop modelling schemas that enable to integrate spatial information, as embedded in maps, with the textual information produced through computer-mediated communication. Therefore the expected outcome of this study is twofold: on one hand we plan to find a computational description of space using the annotations of the space inputed by the users (and viceversa); on the other hand, we are planning to proof the goodness of such description through an applied verification. [more]

MapTribe (2003)

A tool for collaborative mobile learning about the image of the city

MapTribe is based on the idea that every person retains and develops over time an image of the spaces s/he lives, which may be quite different from the physical inhabited place. It is commonly experienced, in fact, that places are enriched of psychological features that transform their perception. MapTribe is a tool for exchanging and comparing these personal images of the city among a group of friends. The tool we are developing helps people in analysing, capturing and visualizing this mental structure and to share it in a social network. From the negotiation of the differences between the maps of each participant in the group, a common understanding raises, an informal learning obtained by each user of the system about the image of the city. [more]

Biosphera (2002)

A biological micro world for experiments with ecology

Biosphera is an enclosed microworld in which children can control environmental parameters such as light, pressure, humidity, temperature, chemical conditions, and populations of microorganisms. A computer interface works with sensors and actuators to affect the physical world of the Biosphera. Through this interplay of perceptual accessibility and virtual representations, we hopes to stimulate, support, and improve children's interest and understanding of science, ecology, biology, chemistry, and system dynamics. [more]

SensoDrama (2002)

A general purpose construction kit

This is a general purpose construction kit for children to create ‘representational’ models of the world, which have personal meaning to them. Sensodramas toolkit comes with a set of sensors that children can use to capture real world data such as light, noise, temperature, pressure etc. It can be used for a variety of school experiments as well as for more personal projects such as tracking your health. [more]

DigitalSeed (2001)

A tool for learning about plant growth, life cycles and the origin of seeds

The Digital Seed is a virtual alter-ego of a real seed, he lives in a cube. To grow up he needs help from outside, the user must take care of the seed: watering the cube, keeping the cube the right temperature, and exposing it to the right amount of light. The physical actions on the cube will affect the inner virtual world where the seed lives and grows. The user must care for the seed throughout its life cycle until the end, with the birth of a new seed. [more]

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