Within Human-Machine systems and interaction the present special session aims at featuring state of the scientific research on “good” technologies. By good technologies we refer to those technologies that have and aim to promote a positive impact on people’s lives. Some classic examples of application domains are: healthcare, assistance, education, human rights and much more. In this context, the widespread use of portable devices, such as smartphones, tablets, smart watches, or smart objects with computational, sensing and communication capabilities, of vocal user interfaces, chatbot and social robots, is creating opportunities for research and industry to have a positive impact on people’s lives. In particular, we aim at investigating how, by integrating both computational and psychological approaches, it is possible to design and develop systems that understand people’s needs, recognize problems and intelligently compute behaviours in order to improve the quality of people’s lives. In this context, from a computational point of view it is necessary to cope with real-time demands, changing of contextual situation, human behaviors, and so on, on the other hand from a psychological point of view, it seems important to test theoretical models that explain emotional and cognitive factors who favour ‘positive’ behaviors in order to promote them across several contexts.

The aim of this Special Session is to bring together researchers and practitioners who are working on various aspects of intelligent and adaptive systems, both from computational and psychological point of view, to understand the present state of the art in systems for good technologies; to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue among the interested field of research, to understand psychological processes in real time situations.

Berardina De Carolis, University of Bari, Italy

Francesca D’Errico, Roma Tre University, Italy

Veronica Rossano, University of Bari, Italy