Antonella Poce currently holds the post of Associate Professor (qualified as a full professor), in Experimental Pedagogy at the department of Education – University Roma TRE, where she directs the Centre for Museum Education and the post graduate courses: annual Museum Education and biennial Advanced Studies in Museum Education. She coordinates national units within European project frameworks and she has been chairing international academic committees dealing with distance learning. She is author of different publications of national and international relevance on the topics of innovation, assessment and use of technology in teaching and learning, in the context of heritage fruition

Keynote's talk: DESIGNING INCLUSIVE LEARNING PATHS THROUGH DIGITAL STORYTELLING: A PILOT EXPERIMENTATION IN A VR INTERACTIVE ETRUSCAN EXHIBITION
Although the digitization of museum collections and their digital experiences are not recent in the field of heritage fruition, the current global health emergency showed the need to reflect upon how to innovate and make them more and more effective from different points of views both educational and technical. Moreover, museums are growingly recognized to be educational sites which could promote social and cultural integration through different methodologies such as Digital Storytelling (DST), Virtual Reality (VR) and Personalised Education.
The Keynote presentation will introduce the possible solutions to design a VR museum exhibition for pedagogical purposes, by maintaining the focus on the promotion of cultural inclusion, personalization and visitors’ critical reflection. Furthermore, some results from the pilot experience of the “The E-Trouria App” in museum education context will be presented: “The E-Trouria App” is a VR exhibition aimed at providing participants with personalized learning paths based on Etruscan museum objects from a collection in Rome. The pilot experience is aimed at testing an Inclusive VR Etruscan Exhibition designed to foster the construction of a shared collective social memory by combining DST methodologies with learning instructions based on Visual Thinking and Critical Reflection. The interactive virtual museum should not be simply conceived as a simulation of the physical museum experience. The aim is to offer a completely different experience - virtual and augmented - of the museum exhibition. Thus, a visual abstraction approach was exploited and a specific User Interface, for the interaction between the user and the space / object, has been designed. Additionally, the App was designed by combining different pedagogical methods such as Digital Storytelling and Reflective Questioning.
The goals of the pilot study were to understand (1) visitors’ satisfaction of the experience (2) the existence of a relation between visitors’ preference and their personal features (3) participants’ manifestation of Critical Thinking during the visit. 20 postgraduate students (F = 17; M = 3; Average age = 36 years) in Museum Education and 120 students from the master courses in Education took part in the pilot experience. Different kinds of data were collected and analysed: log data and participants reactions to stories and pieces of arts were used to understand to which extent participants enjoy the visit. Open-ended answers were analysed through a content analysis methodology to assess participants’ critical thinking reflections. In a Design-Based Research perspective, these data would be used to improve the quality of the learning paths and to better understand how to improve the personalization of the learning experience within the Virtual Etruscan Exhibition.
Keywords: VR museum; Digital Storytelling; Critical Thinking; Assessment; Personalisation

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Berardina De Carolis is an assistant professor at Department of Computer Science, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy, where she leads the Intelligent Interfaces Lab and coordinates the Social Robotics research unit. Her research interests at the moment include affective computing, social robotics, and user modeling. She has published over 150 scientific papers in international journals, books, and conference proceedings. She is in the program committee of several international conferences, and guest editor of special issues of international scientific journals as well as a regular reviewer of many other international journals. She was involved in the organization of several workshops on intelligent interfaces and social robotics.

Keynote's talk: Social Robotics in the Assistive Domain: Experiences and Perspectives
Social Robots are being applied in the assistive domain by acting as a natural and social interface towards applications and services. They act as a coach or tutors and provide motivation, guidance, and support. To be successful, socially assistive robots must be endowed with emotional, cognitive, and social capabilities in order to correctly understand human behavior and provide the appropriate support.
Social Assistive Robots are usually applied in domains in which children with special needs (i.e. affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder) and fragile people like seniors affected by cognitive impairments are involved. In both cases, the robot has to be provided with computational models to deal with the dynamic of social interaction in order to activate customized behaviors for addressing the particular needs of the user, engage the user during the interaction and establish a social long-term interaction. Moreover, the robot can be used as an effective technology in gathering continuous information on the user’s behavior and acting as data concentrators to facilitate the acquisition of novel massive information that can provide useful insights on the specific case and on the domain in general.
Successful applications in the therapy of ASD children and cognitive stimulation of elderly people affected by mild cognitive impairment will be shown and future work directions will be illustrated.