Incentives for Quality over Time – The Case of Facebook Applications

We study the market for applications on Facebook, the dominant platform for social networking and make use of a rule change by Facebook by which high-quality applications were rewarded with further opportunities to engage users. We find that the change led to quality being a more important driver of usage while sheer network size became less important. Further, we find that update frequency helps applications maintain higher usage, while generally usage of Facebook applications declines less rapidly with age

Bringing the OpenMI to LIFE Progress Report No. 4 - 31st March 2008 – 30th September 2008

The Water Framework Directive demands an integrated approach to water management. This requires the ability to predict how catchment processes will behave and interact in response to the activities of water managers and others. In most contexts, it is not feasible to build a single predictive model that adequately represents all the processes; therefore a means of linking models of individual processes is required. This is met by the FP5 HarmonIT project’s Open Modelling Interface and Environment (the OpenMI). The purpose of this project is to transform the OpenMI from a research output to a sustainable operational Standard. It will build the capacity to use the OpenMI and will demonstrate it under operational conditions. It will also develop, test and demonstrate the future support organisation for the OpenMI. Finally, information about the OpenMI will be disseminated to users

The future design direction of smart clothing development

Literature indicates that Smart Clothing applications, the next generation of clothing and electronic products, have been struggling to enter the mass market because the consumers’ latent needs have not been recognised. Moreover, the design direction of Smart Clothes remains unclear and unfocused. Nevertheless, a clear design direction is necessary for all product development. Therefore, this research aims to identify the design directions of the emerging Smart Clothes industry by conducting a questionnaire survey and focus groups with its major design contributors. The results reveal that the current strategy of embedding a wide range of electronic functions in a garment is not suitable. This is primarily because it does not match the users’ requirements, purchasing criteria and lifestyle. The results highlight the respondents’ preference for personal healthcare and sportswear applications that suit their lifestyle, are aesthetically attractive, and provide a practical function

The Industry and Policy Context for Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion:Market Analysis, Future Prospects and Key Challenges in Videogames, Serious Games and Gamification

The effective use of digital games for empowerment and social inclusion (DGEI) of people and communities at risk of exclusion will be shaped by, and may influence the development of a range of sectors that supply products, services, technology and research. The principal industries that would appear to be implicated are the 'videogames' industry, and an emerging 'serious games' industry. The videogames industry is an ecosystem of developers, publishers and other service providers drawn from the interactive media, software and broader ICT industry that services the mainstream leisure market in games, The 'serious games' industry is a rather fragmented and growing network of firms, users, research and policy makers from a variety of sectors. This emerging industry is are trying to develop knowledge, products, services and a market for the use of digital games, and products inspired by digital games, for a range of non-leisure applications. This report provides a summary of the state of play of these industries, their trajectories and the challenges they face. It also analyses the contribution they could make to exploiting digital games for empowerment and social inclusion. Finally, it explores existing policy towards activities in these industries and markets, and draws conclusions as to the future policy relevance of engaging with them to support innovation and uptake of effective digital game-based approaches to empowerment and social inclusion.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Can Who-Edits-What Predict Edit Survival?

As the number of contributors to online peer-production systems grows, it becomes increasingly important to predict whether the edits that users make will eventually be beneficial to the project. Existing solutions either rely on a user reputation system or consist of a highly specialized predictor that is tailored to a specific peer-production system. In this work, we explore a different point in the solution space that goes beyond user reputation but does not involve any content-based feature of the edits. We view each edit as a game between the editor and the component of the project. We posit that the probability that an edit is accepted is a function of the editor's skill, of the difficulty of editing the component and of a user-component interaction term. Our model is broadly applicable, as it only requires observing data about who makes an edit, what the edit affects and whether the edit survives or not. We apply our model on Wikipedia and the Linux kernel, two examples of large-scale peer-production systems, and we seek to understand whether it can effectively predict edit survival: in both cases, we provide a positive answer. Our approach significantly outperforms those based solely on user reputation and bridges the gap with specialized predictors that use content-based features. It is simple to implement, computationally inexpensive, and in addition it enables us to discover interesting structure in the data.Comment: Accepted at KDD 201