I'm Giovanna Broccia, a research scientist at the Formal Methods and Tools Laboratory of the Institute of Information Science and Technology (ISTI) of the National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa, Italy.
I received a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Pisa. My PhD thesis A Formal Framework for Modelling and Analysing Safety-Critical Human Multitasking presents a formal model of safety-critical human multitasking which describes the cognitive processes involved in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the switching of attention among concurrent tasks.
My current research interests lie into different areas:
- User-centred aspects in software engineering (e.g. understandability, learnability, users acceptance, cognition);
- Empirical software engineering and empirical formal methods;
- Requirements engineering;
- Use of formal methods in different application domains such as HCI, medical imaging field, and cognitive science.
Some of my last works deal with the design and creation of user studies on tools and notations comprehensibility and acceptance (see for instance our work on the assessment of Attack-Defense Tree comprehensibility in the field of requirement engineering or our work on the evaluation of the understandability and acceptance of a language workbench).
In 2023 I won the Grant for Young Mobility, a grant for financing a visiting period abroad, thanks to which I visited Prof. Sira Vegas from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid.
To foster my research results and to reach a broader audience, I like to produce videos and slides, that explain different aspects related to my research (see for instance some of my videos on medical imaging , the VoxLogicA input language, or Neverlang Language Workbench).