15 research outputs found

    Models, methods, and tools for developing MMOG backends on commodity clouds

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    Online multiplayer games have grown to unprecedented scales, attracting millions of players worldwide. The revenue from this industry has already eclipsed well-established entertainment industries like music and films and is expected to continue its rapid growth in the future. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have also been extensively used in research studies and education, further motivating the need to improve their development process. The development of resource-intensive, distributed, real-time applications like MMOG backends involves a variety of challenges. Past research has primarily focused on the development and deployment of MMOG backends on dedicated infrastructures such as on-premise data centers and private clouds, which provide more flexibility but are expensive and hard to set up and maintain. A limited set of works has also focused on utilizing the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer of public clouds to deploy MMOG backends. These clouds can offer various advantages like a lower barrier to entry, a larger set of resources, etc. but lack resource elasticity, standardization, and focus on development effort, from which MMOG backends can greatly benefit. Meanwhile, other research has also focused on solving various problems related to consistency, performance, and scalability. Despite major advancements in these areas, there is no standardized development methodology to facilitate these features and assimilate the development of MMOG backends on commodity clouds. This thesis is motivated by the results of a systematic mapping study that identifies a gap in research, evident from the fact that only a handful of studies have explored the possibility of utilizing serverless environments within commodity clouds to host these types of backends. These studies are mostly vision papers and do not provide any novel contributions in terms of methods of development or detailed analyses of how such systems could be developed. Using the knowledge gathered from this mapping study, several hypotheses are proposed and a set of technical challenges is identified, guiding the development of a new methodology. The peculiarities of MMOG backends have so far constrained their development and deployment on commodity clouds despite rapid advancements in technology. To explore whether such environments are viable options, a feasibility study is conducted with a minimalistic MMOG prototype to evaluate a limited set of public clouds in terms of hosting MMOG backends. Foli lowing encouraging results from this study, this thesis first motivates toward and then presents a set of models, methods, and tools with which scalable MMOG backends can be developed for and deployed on commodity clouds. These are encapsulated into a software development framework called Athlos which allows software engineers to leverage the proposed development methodology to rapidly create MMOG backend prototypes that utilize the resources of these clouds to attain scalable states and runtimes. The proposed approach is based on a dynamic model which aims to abstract the data requirements and relationships of many types of MMOGs. Based on this model, several methods are outlined that aim to solve various problems and challenges related to the development of MMOG backends, mainly in terms of performance and scalability. Using a modular software architecture, and standardization in common development areas, the proposed framework aims to improve and expedite the development process leading to higher-quality MMOG backends and a lower time to market. The models and methods proposed in this approach can be utilized through various tools during the development lifecycle. The proposed development framework is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. The thesis presents three case study MMOG backend prototypes that validate the suitability of the proposed approach. These case studies also provide a proof of concept and are subsequently used to further evaluate the framework. The propositions in this thesis are assessed with respect to the performance, scalability, development effort, and code maintainability of MMOG backends developed using the Athlos framework, using a variety of methods such as small and large-scale simulations and more targeted experimental setups. The results of these experiments uncover useful information about the behavior of MMOG backends. In addition, they provide evidence that MMOG backends developed using the proposed methodology and hosted on serverless environments can: (a) support a very high number of simultaneous players under a given latency threshold, (b) elastically scale both in terms of processing power and memory capacity and (c) significantly reduce the amount of development effort. The results also show that this methodology can accelerate the development of high-performance, distributed, real-time applications like MMOG backends, while also exposing the limitations of Athlos in terms of code maintainability. Finally, the thesis provides a reflection on the research objectives, considerations on the hypotheses and technical challenges, and outlines plans for future work in this domain

    Personality Identification from Social Media Using Deep Learning: A Review

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    Social media helps in sharing of ideas and information among people scattered around the world and thus helps in creating communities, groups, and virtual networks. Identification of personality is significant in many types of applications such as in detecting the mental state or character of a person, predicting job satisfaction, professional and personal relationship success, in recommendation systems. Personality is also an important factor to determine individual variation in thoughts, feelings, and conduct systems. According to the survey of Global social media research in 2018, approximately 3.196 billion social media users are in worldwide. The numbers are estimated to grow rapidly further with the use of mobile smart devices and advancement in technology. Support vector machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Multilayer perceptron neural network, and convolutional neural network (CNN) are some of the machine learning techniques used for personality identification in the literature review. This paper presents various studies conducted in identifying the personality of social media users with the help of machine learning approaches and the recent studies that targeted to predict the personality of online social media (OSM) users are reviewed

    A Holmes and Doyle Bibliography, Volume 9: All Formats—Combined Alphabetical Listing

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    This bibliography is a work in progress. It attempts to update Ronald B. De Waal’s comprehensive bibliography, The Universal Sherlock Holmes, but does not claim to be exhaustive in content. New works are continually discovered and added to this bibliography. Readers and researchers are invited to suggest additional content. This volume contains all listings in all formats, arranged alphabetically by author or main entry. In other words, it combines the listings from Volume 1 (Monograph and Serial Titles), Volume 3 (Periodical Articles), and Volume 7 (Audio/Visual Materials) into a comprehensive bibliography. (There may be additional materials included in this list, e.g. duplicate items and items not yet fully edited.) As in the other volumes, coverage of this material begins around 1994, the final year covered by De Waal's bibliography, but may not yet be totally up-to-date (given the ongoing nature of this bibliography). It is hoped that other titles will be added at a later date. At present, this bibliography includes 12,594 items

    [DiaGram]; Rethinking Graphic Design Process

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    Central to any graphic design education is the teaching of a design (or creative) process as an aid to problem-solving. This study draws upon experimental workshops within design education, together with current thinking from the broader arts, emotional psychology and the brain sciences, to explore the idea of repositioning process as the ‘main event’ – rather than it being a means-to-an-end. The study sought to frame learning experiences that enabled students to consciously become the object of their own study; including themes that explored ‘personal identity’, ‘dualism’, ‘mind-wandering’ and ‘habit’ as mechanisms to enhance our creative capacity, and evidenced significant improvements in the students’ confidence, dexterity and working methodologies (including the elusive ‘risk’ and ‘play’). The emerging conclusions propose key anchors (‘dissociative creativity’, ‘process as the main event’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘immersion’) that we believe ought to be central to the development of any new teaching (esp. within graphic design). Keywords: Design, Education, Process, Creativity, Risk Full paper. Delivered 31 May 2017. Page 81–95 of attached document

    An Industry of Indies: The New Cultural Economy of Digital Game Production

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    An Industry of Indies builds upon foundational questions concerned with the constitution, operations, changes, disruptions, and borders of the global digital games industry. Although scholars have engaged with the dynamics of the video game industry, few have analyzed the emergence of indie games over the last decade and the impact of these small games on the always already shifting terrain of this industry. During this period, the video game industry has been confronting a wave of changes wrought by continually emerging technologies, player expectations, and a generation of small game developers who have challenged particular industry practices and dogmas, even as they also provide value to the industry’s largest video game publishers and platform holders. An Industry of Indies examines a range of independent, marginal, and alternative digital game production cultures across the globe, from commercial indie games to radical avant-garde games, and delineates the cultural and economic relationship of each to the global economy of digital game production and consumption. This dissertation argues that despite the desire for real subversion amongst various indie development communities, an underlying neoliberal logic drives many of their entrepreneurial business practices. Even as many commercial indie developers distinguish their workplace practices, design approaches, and development ethos from the mainstream, corporate industry, most still rely on the same ideologies of bootstrap individualism and free market politics that undergird the dominant industry. Furthermore, even those developers who distance themselves from the industry, usually accompanied by a feminist and/or Marxist critique of industry practices or output, necessarily have to rely on venture capital funded startup companies like Patreon in order to connect with their fans and earn a living within a capitalist system with which they disagree – a sad irony not lost on them. Within this greater context, the indie developer becomes a point of struggle between notions of the counter-hegemonic creative artist and the idea of the success-driven technology startup company, with the concepts of passion, art, and sustainability suturing the two perspectives together. This project employs a middle-range media industries approach to describe and analyze the operations of indie developers within the global digital games industry, specifically an approach that combines interdisciplinary elements of cultural studies, discourse analysis, political economy, and feminist media studies. That is, this dissertation articulates the organization, operations, and agents of the commercial video game industry, in its largest and smallest forms, in order to describe how independent and alternative development cultures fit within larger systems of capital exchange, from commercial shops to solitary producers. It offers three significant interventions, primarily in the areas of media industries studies and game studies. An Industry of Indies examines indie games not only as alternative art or politics but as cultural products within complex, global ecologies of exchange; it focuses on the industry’s smallest companies rather than its largest corporations; and it interrogates the boundary-policing strategies within media industries, arguing that commonly conceived barriers between amateur and professional media producers are, in fact, fluid and wavering, dependent on constantly shifting discourses and industrial practices, policies, and standards

    Undergraduate Review, Vol. 9, 2012/2013

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    Statistics in the 150 years from Italian Unification. SIS 2011 Statistical Conference, Bologna, 8 – 10 June 2011. Book of short paper.

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