acdpires@fc.ul.pt

Ana Cristina Pires

PostDoc Researcher

I am a cognitive psychologist with experience in multidisciplinary Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Currently, I am a PostDoc Researcher in LASIGE, Faculty of Science, University of Lisboa. In our projects, we emphasize participatory design, user-centered design and the use of multimodal interactive systems. We personalize and tailor digital interventions to enable a greater behavioural change and adherence to the treatment or training. Great part of my work has been to create cognitive and educational tools to foster the acquisition of core skills, such as executive functions, mathematics and computational thinking in younger children- sighted and visually impaired children. We use multisensory environments combining tangible interaction with digital auditory feedback, to enable blind children to take benefits from both real and virtual worlds. We also apply inclusive multisensory systems in other domains, as for instance, in neuro-cognitive assessments for elderly people (including visual impaired people).

Publications

Exploring Collaboration in Programming Activities with Children with Visual Impairments: a 10-Session Study in a School Setting

Filipa Rocha, David Gonçalves, Ana Cristina Pires, Hugo Nicolau, Tiago Guerreiro

CSCW 2025 ‑ ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, October, 2025

Inclusive Computational Thinking in Public Schools: A Case Study from Lisbon

Ana Pires, Filipa Rocha, Tiago Guerreiro, Hugo Nicolau

Interactions 2023 ‑ ACM Interactions Magazine, July-August, 2024

TACTOPI: Exploring Play with an Inclusive Multisensory Environment for Children with Mixed-Visual Abilities

Ana Pires, Lúcia Abreu, Filipa Rocha, Hugo Simão, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro, Hugo Nicolau

IDC 2023 ‑ ACM Interaction Design and Children, June, 2023

Coding Together: On Co-located and Remote Collaboration between Children with Mixed-Visual Abilities

Filipa Rocha, Filipa Correia, Isabel Neto, Ana Pires, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro, Hugo Nicolau

CHI 2023 ‑ ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April, 2023

Current Practices in Teaching Computational Thinking to Children: Accessibility is an Afterthought

Marta Carvalho, Filipa Rocha, João Guerreiro, Hugo Nicolau, Tiago Guerreiro, Ana Pires

ACM IDC Workshops 2022 ‑ Co-designing with Mixed-ability Groups of Children to Promote Inclusive Education, 2022

Projects

Photo taken from the Workshop with children. Two visually impaired children perform a goal-directed programming activity using a map located on the table. The activity consists of moving the robot to reach the duck. The map is made of 4 EVA foam tiles with two different colors. The child on the right is concentrated in arranging the blocks while the children at the left are touching the duck after the robot reached the duck. This child is smiling and has much of his body on the table.

Inclusive education

We aim to develop technological solutions to enable an inclusive education for children with mixed abilities. We have mainly developed enhanced tangible objects for the acquisition of abstract concepts, such as mathematics or computational thinking. Besides the benefit of decreasing cognitive load and reinforcing understanding, manipulatives also support collaboration, making children more prone to divide, explore and share supporting cooperative actions.

Photo taken to a 2 years-old girl who is smiling and pointing to the camera.

Personalized Digital Interventions

We seek to tailor and personalize digital interventions to increase users motivation and adherence to the interventions. To this end, is crucial to gather a deep understanding of the intervention, context of use, benefits and difficulties associated and to accede to the mental models (goals, needs, motivations, etc) of the users.

The robot Baxter with his arms extended and a blind person feeling its hands

HRI for Health & Accessibility

Robots have a very particular set of skills. Skills that have been acquired over a vast amount of reasearch. Skills that make them powerful tools to leverage for social inclusion, accessibility and interaction.

Storyboard demonstrating a shower attack.

Unauthorized Access to Smartphones

Unlike unlock authentication, which is an active defense against physical intrusion, passive defenses aim to primarily provide awareness, traceability, and recovery from intrusions; and to only secondarily engage counter-measures like blocking access. In sensitive computer systems, passive security is embodied in Intrusion Detection and Response (IDR) systems. To end-users, however, parallel capabilities remain unavailable, or lack security and usability validation, despite the severe privacy implications of intrusions. We thus envision a mobile IDR which is usable by individuals with no technical training; which can detect suspicious activity based on semantics of intrusion behavior; and which can respond to threats per their importance.