What I do

My research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization and Data Analysis, User Experience Modeling, Reflective technologies, Interpretation systems, or Document and Knowledge Engineering. Application domains are related to education, culture, health, humanities… I focus on interdisciplinary approaches for the study of human-machine coupling and co-development and collaborate with people from sociology, psychology, ergonomy, anthropology, education science, philosophy, design, medecine, focusing on real world activities.

News (all)

Dec. 20: PhD Thesis Defense on Progressive Analytics. Vincent Raveneau has successfully defended his thesis on Progressive Pattern mining, the source code of the tool he built is available as open source. A dedicated webpage is available with all the information (manuscript, slides, source code, etc.

Nov. 20: Postdoc in France (18 months) - Executive Function testing in Virtual Reality. Within an ongoing collaboration between and Nantes Universities, Hanyang and Nantes University Hospitals, on the use of VR environments for the testing of executive functions in VR, the candidate will design and develop a new integrated VR environment, design an experimental protocol that will be run both in France and Korea. (more info)

Nov. 19: Postdoc position in Immersive Analytics (6-7 months from Jan. 202O). The candidate will extend the work we have been carrying on how to visualize and interact with 3D scatterplots in Virtual Reality. His/her first task is to develop an experiment that aims to compare two types of data immersion. Other tasks and research directions will depend on personal interest of the candidate. (more info)

Recent publications (all)

Nicolas Ribeiro, Toinon Vigier, Yannick Prié. (2021) Tracking motor activity in Virtual Reality to reveal cognitive functioning: A preliminary study in International Journal of Virtual Reality, 21(1), 30-46. doi Show abstract A challenge for cognitive research is the better understanding of how motor activity influences and is influenced by other cognitive domains. We developed a preliminary study to investigate whether tracking motor functioning in virtual reality provides useful insight on cognitive functioning. We chose the flankers task as an assessment measure and built a VR environment into which seven participants completed more than 1250 trials. In addition to classical results of the flankers task showing that incongruent stimuli induce slower responses than others., we also identified how individuals are able to correct their initially incorrect motor response. This indicator may shed new light into the functioning of cognitive control in the future. We discuss the potential offered by virtual reality technology for cognitive assessment through embodied considerations of cognition.

Madjid Sadallah, Benoît Encelle, Azze-Eddine Maredj, Yannick Prié. (2020) Towards fine-grained reading dashboards for online course revision in Educational Technology Research and Development, 22p doi Show abstract Providing high-quality courses is of utmost importance to drive successful learning. This compels course authors to continuously review their contents to meet learners’ needs. However, it is challenging for them to detect the reading barriers that learners face with content, and to identify how their courses can be improved accordingly. In this paper, we propose a learning analytics approach for assisting course authors performing these tasks. Using logs of learners’ activity, a set of indicators related to course reading activity are computed and used to detect issues and to suggest content revisions. The results are presented to authors through CoReaDa, a learning dashboard empowered with assistive features. We instantiate our proposals using the logs of a major European e-learning platform, and validate them through a study. Study results show the effectiveness of our approach providing authors with more awareness and guidance in improving their courses, to better suit learners’ requirements.

Adrien Fonnet, Yannick Prié. (2020) Survey of Immersive Analytics in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 22 pp. doi Show abstract Immersive analytics (IA) is a new term referring to the use of immersive technologies for data analysis. Yet such applications are not new, and numerous contributions have been made in the last three decades. However, no survey reviewing all these contributions is available. Here we propose a survey of IA from the early nineties until the present day, describing how rendering technologies, data, sensory mapping, and interaction means have been used to build IA systems, as well as how these systems have been evaluated. The conclusions that emerge from our analysis are that: multi-sensory aspects of IA are under-exploited, the 3DUI and VR community knowledge regarding immersive interaction is not sufficiently utilised, the IA community should focus on converging towards best practices, as well as aim for real life IA systems.

Madjid Sadallah, Benoît Encelle, Azze-Eddine Maredj, Yannick Prié. (2019) Leveraging Learners’ Activity Logs for Course Reading Analytics Using Session-Based Indicators in International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 12 (1) doi Show abstract A challenge that course authors face when reviewing their contents is to detect how to improve their courses in order to meet the expectations of their learners. In this paper, we propose an analytical approach that exploits learners’ logs of reading to provide authors with insightful data about the consumption of their courses. We first model reading activity using the concept of reading-session and propose a new and efficient session identification. We then elaborate a list of indicators computed using learners’ reading sessions that allow to represent their behaviour and to infer their needs. We evaluate our proposals with course authors and learners using logs from a major e-learning platform. Interesting results were found. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach in identifying aspects and parts of a course that may prevent it from being easily read and understood, and for guiding the authors through the analysis and review tasks.