Tsvi Kuflik

• PhD.
• Chair at University of Haifa

Museums serve as essential cultural centers, yet their mostly visual exhibits restrict access for blind and partially sighted (BPS) individuals. While recent technological advances have started to bridge this gap, many accessibility solutions focus mainly on basic inclusion rather than promoting independent exploration. This research addresses this...

Indoor positioning remains a significant challenge, particularly in environments such as museums, where the installation of specialized positioning infrastructure may be impractical. Recent advances in image processing offer effective and precise methods for object recognition, presenting a viable alternative. This study explores the feasibility of...

This study introduces a novel approach to text alignment tailored for ancient languages, with a focus on Hebrew and Aramaic, aimed at enhancing text reuse detection. Unlike previous methods, our approach integrates multiple NLP components into a specialized comparison pipeline, which is then incorporated into the Smith–Waterman algorithm. This inte...

This study presents the development and evaluation of an image-based positioning system for a mobile museum visitors’ guide system comprising two components: An Android application and a backend service. The application identifies visitors’ location by capturing and sending images to the server, which then determines their location within the museu...

This research explores how Interactive Multimodal Tangible Interface (IMTIs) exploiting advanced technologies such as 3D printing and microcontrollers to enhance museum experiences for blind and low vision (BLV) visitors. It investigates the potential for these technologies to create more inclusive and engaging museum environments. Four IMTIs were...

New curatorial practices have emerged in the last decade to increase the engagement of citizens in cultural heritage, ranging from visitors’ experiential feedback to exhibitions and cultural artifacts, to digitally mediated forms of interaction, such as social media and games. Within this context, citizen curation is proposed as a methodology for e...

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) identifies daily activities from time-series data collected by wearable devices like smartwatches. Recent advancements in Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and low-cost sensors have broadened HAR applications across fields like healthcare, biometrics, sports, and personal fitness. However, challenges remain...

The authenticity of classical Arabic poetry has long been challenged by claims that some part of the pre-Islamic poetic heritage should not be attributed to this era. According to these assertions, some of this legacy was produced after the advent of Islam and ascribed, for different reasons, to pre-Islamic poets. As pre-Islamic poets were illitera...

Accessibility gains importance and is becoming a central component on the agenda of cultural and heritage sites, such as museums, especially since the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. A range of innovative technologies are being designed to facilitate accessibility for museum visitors. These new technolo...

In this paper, we present and evaluate a calibration-free mobile eye-traking system. The system’s mobile device consists of three cameras: an IR eye camera, an RGB eye camera, and a front-scene RGB camera. The three cameras build a reliable corneal imaging system that is used to estimate the user’s point of gaze continuously and reliably. The syste...

(1) Background: Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is associated with reduced muscle mass, strength, and function, leading to frailty. This study aims to analyze the movement patterns (MPs) of older individuals with T2D across varying levels of physical capacity (PC). (2) Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among individuals aged 60 or older with T2D...

Accessibility gains importance and is becoming a central component on the agenda of cultural and heritage sites, such as museums, especially since the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. A range of innovative technologies are being designed to facilitate accessibility for museum visitors. These new technolo...

Bias in news search engines has been shown to influence users' perceptions of a news topic and contribute to the polarisation of society. As a result, there is a need for news search engines that increase user awareness of biases in the search results. While technical approaches have been developed to mitigate biases in search, very few studies hav...

Cultural heritage is often questioned for its relevance or criticized for representing an incomplete picture of the past. Interactive technologies can bring up new viewpoints, and alternative narratives, or intensify or provoke the user experience when cultural heritage is accessed. They can be utilized in contextualized built environments, which f...

State-of-the-art handwritten text recognition models make frequent use of deep neural networks, with recurrent and connectionist temporal classification layers, which perform recognition over sequences of characters. This architecture may lead to the model learning statistical linguistic features of the training corpus, over and above graphic featu...

A novel, rule-based, automatic framework for identifying rhetorical elements in classical Arabic poetry is described. Since rule-based approaches have well-known limitations, it is proposed as an interim solution until a sufficient quantity of annotated text has been amassed with which to train a machine-learning algorithm. The manual process of id...

Recommender systems provide personalized recommendations to their users for items and services. They do that using a model that is tailored to each user to infer their preferences based on their characteristics and previous interactions they have made with the system. Recent research suggests that users of a recommender system may like to receive s...

In this paper, we present a framework for 3D gaze estimation intended to identify the user’s focus of attention in a corneal imaging system. The framework uses a headset that consists of three cameras, a scene camera and two eye cameras: an IR camera and an RGB camera. The IR camera is used to continuously and reliably track the pupil and the RGB c...

Mitigating bias in algorithmic systems is a critical issue drawing attention across communities within the information and computer sciences. Given the complexity of the problem and the involvement of multiple stakeholders—including developers, end users, and third-parties—there is a need to understand the landscape of the sources of bias, and the...

Cultural heritage (CH) values are important for understanding the significance of heritage assets. For that reason, the presentation of CH should go beyond providing factual information. It should reflect relevant values that are held by the curators, the heritage experts and the communities of non-expert citizen stakeholders. Associating values wi...

Provider networks are looking to follow the footsteps of cloud-based networks/data centers and incorporate Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology. This move is problematic for various reasons, such as the networks’ size and the providers’ inability to control users’ activity. Additionally, research into these networks is handicapped by the la...

This document describes the rationale, the implementation and a preliminary evaluation of a semantic reasoning tool developed in the EU H2020 SPICE project to enhance the diversity of perspectives experienced by museum visitors. The tool, called DEGARI 2.0 for values, relies on the commonsense reasoning framework T CL , and exploits an ontological...

Whether we like it or not, algorithmic decision-making systems (ADMSs) are all around us. These systems assist both public institutions and private organizations in making decisions that exert a significant impact on our lives. The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems and the potential risks of using them...

The widespread use of temporal aspects in user modeling indicates their importance, and their consideration showed to be highly effective in various domains related to user modeling, especially in recommender systems. Still, past and ongoing research, spread over several decades, provided multiple ad-hoc solutions, but no common understanding of th...

Making ancient handwritten manuscripts accessible to the general public is challenging, for several reasons. Foremost, they are handwritten. Each and every one is unique, so there is a need for manual transcription for providing enough examples for training a machine-learning-based algorithm to automatically transcribe the handwritten text. Moreove...

With the rapid evolution of technology, computers and their users’ workspaces have become an essential part of our life in general. Today, many people use computers both for work and for personal needs, spending long hours sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen, changing their pose slightly from time to time. This phenomenon impacts people...

Introduction: Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) is associated with reduced muscle mass, strength and function leading to frailty and disability. Little is known regarding the continuous movement patterns and glucose fluctuation in these functional states. Aims: To identify differences in movement patterns and glucose levels in elderly people with diabetes with...

In light of the widespread use of algorithmic (intelligent) systems across numerous domains, there is an increasing awareness about the need to explain their underlying decision-making process and resulting outcomes. Since oftentimes these systems are being considered as black boxes, adding explanations to their outcomes may contribute to the perce...

Digital archives of memory institutions are typically concerned with the cataloguing of artefacts of artistic, historical, and cultural value. Recently, new forms of citizen participation in cultural heritage have emerged, producing a wealth of material spanning from visitors’ experiential feedback on exhibitions and cultural artefacts to digitally...

As linear TV remains a major source for media consumption, multiple stakeholders such as broadcasters and advertisers are interested in the prediction of the next programs to be watched by TV viewers. Such predictions are quite challenging given the nature of the domain, where viewing TV is not just an individual activity but is also influenced by...

When we consider our CV, it is full of entities that we are or were associated with and that define us in some way(s). Such entities include where we studied, where we worked, who we collaborated with on a project or on a paper etc. Entities we are linked to are part of who we are and may reveal about what we are interested in. Hence, we can view a...

Recommender systems make use of different sources of information for providing users with recommendations of items. Such systems are often based on either collaborative filtering methods which make automatic predictions about the interests of a user, using preferences of similar users, or content based filtering that matches the user’s personal pre...

Over the years, there has been an ongoing increase in the use of virtual gaming (VG) implemented via a range of technologies for the rehabilitation of children with disabilities including cerebral palsy (CP). While many VG-based devices have been developed over the past decade, many have been tested primarily for post-stroke therapy and included li...

Purpose: To demonstrate the potential role of virtual game personalisation for use as a therapeutic modality to improve upper extremity function in children with cerebral palsy (CP). Methods: The study tested a convenience sample of 60 typically developing children (TD) aged 6-10 years and 20 children with CP aged 7-11 years. Children participat...

Contemporary theories of social cohesion emphasize the importance of people accepting and appreciating differences across social groups. The SPICE project aims to promote social cohesion by researching and developing tools and methods to support citizen curation for groups at risk of exclusion. We define citizen curation as a process in which citiz...

Over the past years, there has been an increasing concern regarding the risk of bias and discrimination in algorithmic systems, which received significant attention amongst the research communities. To ensure the system’s fairness, various methods and techniques have been developed to assess and mitigate potential biases. Such methods, also known a...

The first FATE Winter School, organized by the Cyprus Center for Algorithmic Transparency (CyCAT) provided a forum for both students as well as senior researchers to examine the complex topic of Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics (FATE). Through a program that included two invited keynotes, as well as sessions led by CyCAT partners a...

As the role of algorithmic systems and processes increases in society, so does the risk of bias, which can result in discrimination against individuals and social groups. Research on algorithmic bias has exploded in recent years, highlighting both the problems of bias, and the potential solutions, in terms of algorithmic transparency (AT). Transpar...

This paper discusses educating stakeholders of algorithmic systems (systems that apply Artificial Intelligence/Machine learning algorithms) in the areas of algorithmic fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics (FATE). We begin by establishing the need for such education and identifying the intended consumers of educational materials on the...

Mitigating bias in algorithmic systems is a critical issue drawing attention across communities within the information and computer sciences. Given the complexity of the problem and the involvement of multiple stakeholders, including developers, end-users and third-parties, there is a need to understand the landscape of the sources of bias, and the...

This year, the 28th (and the first virtual) ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP 2020, virtually in Genoa, Italy, July 12-18, 2020) was held virtually due to Covid-19 pandemic. UMAP is the premier international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual us...

Technologies such as context-aware mobile augmented reality (MAR) offer new ways of delivering information and creating new experiences for visitors of cultural heritage (CH) sites. Significant progress has been made in MAR for indoor museum visits. However, studies investigating the way that visitors interact with MAR in an open-air museum are lac...

The SPICE project builds on the growing trend for museums, rather than providing an authoritative view, to present multiple voices related to their collection and exhibitions. In SPICE, an approach we term citizen curation is proposed as a way of supporting visitors to share their own interpretations of museum objects and reflect on the variety of...

In the last decade, mobile eye trackers have become a commodity. With the decrease in their cost and their increased availability, a growing number of studies are exploring their potential in cultural heritage. In works on art fruition, the idea of using mobile eye trackers to understand how we observe artistic exhibits is becom- ing commonplace. F...

The growing availability of social media and other online information sources has increased interest in sentiment analysis to understand the emotional responses of users. Being able to visualize users' emotions could help stakeholders to better understand the underlying trends behind events or stories. Various techniques have been used to generate...

The Workshop on Recommenders in Tourism (RecTour) 2019, which is held in conjunction with the 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys), addresses specific challenges for recommender systems in the tourism domain. In this overview paper, we summarize our motivations to organize the RecTour workshop and present the main topics of the submi...

This paper describes an exploratory study that attempts to classify museum visitors by taking into consideration indoor behavior and demographic features. We discuss different approaches of using such data for improving the user experience in the museum. Moreover, we try to explain user’s behavior by creating different user groups using a novel dat...

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the ACM 2019 PATCH. Following the successful series of PATCH workshops, started in 2007, PATCH 2019 is organized as the meeting point between state of the art cultural heritage research and personalization - using any kind of technology, while focusing on ubiquitous and adaptive scenarios, to enhance the p...

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Second FairUMAP workshop at UMAP 2019. This full-day workshop brings together researchers working at the intersection of user modeling, adaptation, and personalization on one hand, and bias, fairness and transparency in algorithmic systems on the other hand. The workshop was motivated by the observatio...

The world is changing and with the evolution of technology computers have become an essential part of humans' lives. Nowadays many people use computers for both work and personal life, and especially spending hours sitting at a desk in front of their computer screens. This phenomenon negatively influences people's health, affecting their skeletal a...

This paper briefly describes aspects of the Tikkoun Sofrim crowdsourcing webApp. Tikkoun Sofrim is a webApp which allows users to correct automatic transcriptions (AT) done by an AI Neural network engine. We look at the background of the crowdsourcing phenomenon in the use of automatic transcription of digital humanities documents. System structure...

This paper outlines RSR, a relational social recommendation approach applied to a social graph comprised of relational entity profiles. RSR uses information extraction and learning methods to obtain relational facts about persons of interest from the Web, and generates an associative entity-relation social network from their extracted personal prof...