Archive for January, 2011

EteRNA is a new online game developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University researchers. Unless many video games that provide realistic graphics and game play, but have no connection with reality, this game helps providing real-life scientific results in the biochemistry domain. “EteRNA harnesses game play to uncover principles for designing molecules of RNA, which biologists believe may be the key regulator of everything that happens in living cells.”

Players are not only scored and ranked based on how much they play; they are scored by nature, depending on how well their virtual designs can be rendered as real, physical molecules. An additional incentive for users to participate in the game – beside the one of being able to contribute to real scientific research – is provided by the integration of the game with Facebook. Players can there talk about the game, post their accomplishments and compete with each other.

Read more about it at: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2011/January/jan11_eterna.shtml

1st Call for Papers PlayIT’11

1st International Workshop on Games for Knowledge Acquisition
Located at the 20th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2011
March 28 or 29, Hyderabad, India

Website:http://www.insemtives.eu/playit11/

Deadline for submissions: February 5, 2011 11.59 PM CET

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** Content **
Many areas of knowledge acquisition inherently rely on the availability on large quantities of human input. The problem is that in many of these domains, users lack the motivation to contribute the required metadata. At the same time, there is a steady trend of people spending a substantial amount of time in playing games. As initially proposed by Luis von Ahn’s Games with a Purpose , one can benefit from the vast amount of hours spent on online playing, by applying mechanisms to extract meaningful information from game inputs. Since then, there have been many proposals to use casual games which capitalize on fun and competition as two key motivators for people, to willingly invest time and effort in knowledge-acquisition related tasks hiding behind an entertaining collaborative game experience.

The PLAYIT workshop will provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in Web technologies to discuss and exchange positions on the topic of using games for acquiring knowledge following the paradigm of human computation.

** Topics **
The objective of PLAYIT is to foster the thinking process about games that have the purpose of acquiring knowledge in some form. The topics include but are not limited to:

* Analysis and surveys of games with the purpose of knowledge acquisition
* Proposals for new game models for acquiring knowledge
* Cost – benefit analysis for games
* Games exploiting the “Wisdom of Crowds”
* New games for creating different types of information in a human-driven way
* Evaluations of “games with a purpose”
* Going beyond quiz gaming models and using new game formats for creating information (e.g. shooters, fantasy games, role plays, etc.)
* Games for data interlinking, multimedia annotation, text analysis, speech analysis, etc.
* Game architectures and technology
* Game interoperability

** Submissions **
We seek three kinds of submissions:
1. Full technical papers: up to 8 pages in ACM format
2. Short technical and position papers: up to 4 pages in ACM format
3. Demo descriptions: up to 2 pages in ACM format

Submissions must be formatted using the WWW2011 templates. Please note that the author list does not need to be anonymized, as we do not operate a double-blind review process.

Submissions will be peer reviewed by at least three independent reviewers. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the workshop proceedings. Proceedings will be published online at CEUR-WS.

Please submit papers as PDF via EasyChair at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=playit11

** Important Dates **

* Submission deadline: February 5, 2011 11.59 PM CET
* Notification of acceptance: February 25, 2011
* Camera-ready versions of accepted papers: March 5, 2011
* Workshop date: 28th or 29th March, 2011

** Program Committee **
* Roberta Cuel, University of Trento
* Carl Goodman, Peppersghost Productions
* Hans-Joerg Happel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
* Tania Tudorache, University of Stanford
* Denny Vrandecic, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
* Robert West, University of Stanford
* Giuseppe Attardi, Università di Pisa
* Jon Chamberlain, University of Essex
* Amac Herdagdelen, University of Trento
* Edith Law, Carnegie Mellon University
* Donn Morrison, University of Geneva
* Marta Sabou, MODUL University Vienna
* Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research
* Stefan Thaler, University of Innsbruck
* Johanna Voelker, University of Mannheim
* Jeff Yan, Newcastle University
* Marco Zamarian, University of Trento

** Contact **
Please contact the chairs at playit11@easychair.org

* Katharina Siorpaes, STI Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Austria
* Arpita Ghosh, Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, USA
* Michael Fink, Google Israel
* Elena Simperl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany