Posts Tagged ‘“games with a purpose”’

Applications are invited for the position of “Post-doctoral Research Fellow” as part of a joint research project between the Masdar Institute of Science& Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project’s Principal Investigators are:

• Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Masdar Institute& MIT (www.mit.edu/~irahwan)
• Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, MIT (http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy)

The successful candidate will work on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project. The project , titled “Influencing Collective Human Behavior Using Distributed Intelligent Systems,” aims to help people use resources more efficiently. The project will have (1) a theoretical component focusing on game-theoretic and incentive mechanism design issues, and (2) an empirical component to test these techniques in behavioral experiments using lab experiments and real deployment through mobile computing and sensor technologies.

For further details, please see: http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/20100529_postdoc_advert.pdf

1st CALL FOR GAME IDEAS

Co-located with the 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010)
as part of the SemWiki 2010 workshop.

30th May – 3rd June, 2010, Heraklion, Greece
http://www.eswc2010.org/

Deadline for submission: 09.04.2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)

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Awards

Win attractive prizes at the INSEMTIVES Game Idea Challenge!

• 1st Prize: iPhone
• 2nd Prize: iPod Nano
• 3rd Prize: iPod Shuffle

Summary

Useful semantic content cannot be created fully automatically, but motivating people to contribute to this process remains challenging. Our project INSEMTIVES revisits fundamental design issues of semantic-content authoring tools in order to find out which incentives speak to people to become engaged with the Semantic Web, and to determine ways in which such mechanisms can be transferred into technology design. Hiding the technicalities of knowledge engineering, semantic annotation and data integration behind captivating, entertaining games seems to be a promising approach to achieve this goal.

As part of the INSEMTIVES game challenge we are looking for colorful, innovative ideas with a twist for new “games with a purpose”. The purpose, of course, is primarily the creation of useful semantic content, but there are no bounds to your creativity. To get some inspiration, you can have a look at some of our games: OntoPronto and OntoTube, which are about the development and population of an ontology, and the semantic annotation of video content, respectively. Other relevant topics could include the annotation of text, music files, photo collections, but also the interlinking of RDF data sets, their curation, the alignment of data sources, or any other aspect that facilitates the uptake of the Semantic Web.

Format

The ideas should be submitted in PDF format per email to games@sti2.at. The text should not exceed five pages and follow the outline below:

• Overview:

             What Semantic Web-related aspect will this game solve? What will attract people to play this game? What is innovative in your idea?

• Game description:

             Explain the game scenario: Is it a multi-players or a single-player game? Is there any time restriction? What is the target of the game? What makes your game entertaining? How do you prevent cheating?

• Screen mocks or sketches of the game:

              How will your game look like? Describe the game interface and provide some pictures, either as screenshots or as hand-made sketches.

• Semantic content creation:

             Explain how the game creates semantic content, that is, how user inputs are translated into RDF(S), OWL etc.

• Validation:

              Explain how can you test whether the semantic content that the game creates is useful.

Review Process

The submitted game ideas will be reviewed by 3 reviewers according to its novelty, entertainment and Semantic Web-related impact value. The awards ceremony will be held at the European Semantic Web Conference as part of the SemWiki 2010 workshop.

Reviewers

• Pierre Andrews, University of Trento, Italy
• Roberta Cuel, University of Trento, Italy
• Carl Goodman, Pepper’s Ghost Productions, UK
• Elena Simperl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Katharina Siorpaes, STI Innsbruck, Austria
• Germán Toro del Valle, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo
• Torben Wiedenhöfer, University of Siegen, Germany
•  Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Italy
• Marco Zamarian, University of Trento, Italy

Important Dates

• Deadline for submissions: 09.04.2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)
• Notification of the winners: 23.04.2010
• ESWC2010 conference: 30.05 – 03.06.2010
• Awards ceremony: 31.05.2010, co-located with the SemWiki workshop

Contact Information

Katharina Siorpaes
STI Innsbruck, Austria
Email: katharina.siorpaes@sti2.at

Microsoft released in July, 2009 a game called “Page Hunt” that investigates users’ search behavior and gathers their search habits. The game shows some Web pages to the users and wants them to “hunt this page down”, in other words, to guess the search queries, by which this page would be placed within the first five Bing’s search results. It is a single-player game, where the human gets points, if the page takes one of the first five places within search results, and additional bonus if he avoids frequent queries.

The game was developed by Microsoft’s researchers Chris Quirk and Raman Chandrasekar, researchers from Georgia Tech and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was presented to the public at the conference “SIGIR 2009” in Boston. More information about the game you can find on this page:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23898/

It is stated that the researchers have already got some interesting results. One of them – they found the correlation between the number of characters in URL and the difficulty to match this page with the appropriate search queries.

The “Page Hunt” game exploits “human computation” and is interesting from this point of view to our INSEMTIVES project, where we try to develop funny and entertaining “games with a purpose” (in the style of Luis von Ahn)  for developing the Semantic Web.