Vote Goat: Conversational Movie Recommendation

Conversational search and recommendation systems that use natural language interfaces are an increasingly important area raising a number of research and interface design questions. Despite the increasing popularity of digital personal assistants, the number of conversational recommendation systems is limited and their functionality basic. In this demonstration we introduce Vote Goat, a conversational recommendation agent built using Google's DialogFlow framework. The demonstration provides an interactive movie recommendation system using a speech-based natural language interface. The main intents span search and recommendation tasks including: rating movies, receiving recommendations, retrieval over movie metadata, and viewing crowdsourced statistics. Vote Goat uses gamification to incentivize movie voting interactions with the 'Greatest Of All Time' (GOAT) movies derived from user ratings. The demo includes important functionality for research applications with logging of interactions for building test collections as well as A/B testing to allow researchers to experiment with system parameters

:Gamification & Serious Game : Symposium 2016, July 4 & 5

Reinforcing the bridge between local academic and applied worlds in the domain of Serious Game & Gamification, e.g. applied universities and startups. Focusing on three application domain, Helath, Social, and Education, the figure next page illustrates the variety of short talks of the symposium. The three categories of talks (among 14 corresponding short papers): five concept-oriented in green, nine demo-oriented in black, and three roundtables

CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform

Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet and stress management

Scaling collaborative policymaking: how to leverage on digital co-creation to engage citizens

n recent years, new methods to engage citizens in deliberative processes of governments and institutions have been studied. Such methodologies have become a necessity to assure the efficacy and sustainability of policies. Several tools and solutions have been proposed while trying to achieve such a goal. The dual problem to citizen engagement is how to provide policymakers with useful and actionable insights and data stemming from those processes. The following paper has the aim to share with the audience of the Data for Policy Conference 2021 an innovative tool based on the concept of participatory policymaking with the scope of collecting feedback and comments to enhance the consistency and the usefulness of the tool. We propose research featuring a method and implementation of a crowdsourcing and co-creation technique that can provide value to both citizens and policymakers engaged in the policy-making process. Thanks to our methodology, policymakers can design challenges for citizens to take part, cooperate and provide their input to policymakers. We also propose a web-based tool that allows citizens to participate and produce content to support the policymaking processes through a gamified interface that focuses on emotional and vision-oriented content

A Longitudinal Study on Boosting Students’ Performance with a Learning Companion

This study examines the impact of a coded virtual learning companion (LC) that interacts with students of an introductory information systems class throughout the semester. The LC is designed to motivate, advise on time management strategies, and study collaboratively. We conducted a between-subject longitudinal field experiment to investigate the LC’s impact on student motivation, time management, and learning outcomes. Statistical analysis, including a PLS-SEM model, shows that the LC significantly (p \u3c 0.05) improves extrinsic motivation, challenge, short-term planning, and time attitudes. A multiple mediator analysis confirms the role of motivation and time management as mediators between LC use and learning outcomes (subjective knowledge and exam scores). In addition, we conducted a qualitative workshop with the target group to identify barriers to LC adoption and derive mitigation strategies. Overall, our study reveals great potential to facilitate learning with LCs in higher education

Teacher Perceptions of Digital Gaming and 21st-century skills in the Middle School Classroom

Teacher Perceptions of digital gaming and 21st-century skills in Middle School classrooms ABSTRACT The purpose of this research was to capture teacher perceptions on the use of digital gaming in the learning environment of middle school classrooms. Additionally, to speak to perceptions on learning of 21st-century skills such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking. This study of two middle schools in the same district in suburban New Jersey was utilized for capturing the ideas of teachers who employed a variety of digital games in the classroom as part of their learning objectives. An interview protocol was utilized to direct questions around ideas with a focus on: game types, game objectives and observations of learning, as well as perceptions around the assessment of learning. Interviews were conducted with educators both individually and in a group to compile their perspectives on how games can be utilized towards a learning target, specifically to support 21st-century skills. The digital games came in the form of a variety of formats and utilized for different intents, but purposefully integrated to support constructivist learning styles and foster learning. This study contributed information to the literature regarding digital gaming and learning, inclusive and beyond that of engagement. Recommendations for educational leaders and policy makers were outlined as well as suggestions for future research relevant to these ideas were also included

Perceptions of Failure in Education: Changing the Fear of Failure Through Gamification

The purpose of was study is to examine the perceptions in higher education of failure and the use of gamification to address the fear of failure. The perceptions of students about failures and successes in learning through gamification were explored. The research design for the proposed study was a survey comprised of qualitative and quantitative questions. The survey explored how students in formal education view failure in games and in learning, how failure strategies are viewed in higher education lesson plans and if failure strategies can be used to promote learning in games. During the summer of 2014 and during the fall of 2014 both undergraduate and graduate students participated in the survey. Results of this research demonstrate that students in a higher education classroom feel that failure can be a positive learning strategy when followed by thoughtful feedback following the failure experience and when it is applied as part of a trial and error process

Teacher Perceptions of Digital Gaming and 21st-century skills in the Middle School Classroom

Teacher Perceptions of digital gaming and 21st-century skills in Middle School classrooms ABSTRACT The purpose of this research was to capture teacher perceptions on the use of digital gaming in the learning environment of middle school classrooms. Additionally, to speak to perceptions on learning of 21st-century skills such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking. This study of two middle schools in the same district in suburban New Jersey was utilized for capturing the ideas of teachers who employed a variety of digital games in the classroom as part of their learning objectives. An interview protocol was utilized to direct questions around ideas with a focus on: game types, game objectives and observations of learning, as well as perceptions around the assessment of learning. Interviews were conducted with educators both individually and in a group to compile their perspectives on how games can be utilized towards a learning target, specifically to support 21st-century skills. The digital games came in the form of a variety of formats and utilized for different intents, but purposefully integrated to support constructivist learning styles and foster learning. This study contributed information to the literature regarding digital gaming and learning, inclusive and beyond that of engagement. Recommendations for educational leaders and policy makers were outlined as well as suggestions for future research relevant to these ideas were also included