Third International Workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR'16)

Stronger engagement and greater participation is often crucial to reach a goal or to solve an issue. Issues like the emerging employee engagement crisis, insufficient knowledge sharing, and chronic procrastination. In many cases we need and search for tools to beat procrastination or to change people’s habits. Gamification is the approach to learn from often fun, creative and engaging games. In principle, it is about understanding games and applying game design elements in a non-gaming environments. This offers possibilities for wide area improvements. For example more accurate work, better retention rates and more cost effective solutions by relating motivations for participating as more intrinsic than conventional methods. In the context of Information Retrieval (IR) it is not hard to imagine that many tasks could benefit from gamification techniques. Besides several manual annotation tasks of data sets for IR research, user participation is important in order to gather implicit or even explicit feedback to feed the algorithms. Gamification, however, comes with its own challenges and its adoption in IR is still in its infancy. Given the enormous response to the first and second GamifIR workshops that were both co-located with ECIR, and the broad range of topics discussed, we now organized the third workshop at SIGIR 2016 to address a range of emerging challenges and opportunities

GamifIR 2016: SIGIR 2016 Workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval

The third workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR) took place on the 21th of July 2016 in conjunction with SIGIR 2016 in Pisa, Italy. It was the first GamifIR held in conjunction with the SIGIR, the first and second GamifIR workshops were both colocated with ECIR. The workshop program included one invited keynote presentation, seven paper presentations and a discussion session. The keynote presentation stated the necessity of proper theory for gamification design and resulting opportunities. The paper presentation covered studies on diverse areas and approaches for the application of gamification

Third International Workshop on Gamification

Stronger engagement and greater participation is often crucial to reach a goal or to solve an issue. Issues like the emerging employee engagement crisis, insufficient knowledge sharing, and chronic procrastination. In many cases we need and search for tools to beat procrastination or to change people’s habits. Gamification is the approach to learn from often fun, creative and engaging games. In principle, it is about understanding games and applying game design elements in a non-gaming environments. This offers possibilities for wide area improvements. For example more accurate work, better retention rates and more cost effective solutions by relating motivations for participating as more intrinsic than conventional methods. In the context of Information Retrieval (IR) it is not hard to imagine that many tasks could benefit from gamification techniques. Besides several manual annotation tasks of data sets for IR research, user participation is important in order to gather implicit or even explicit feedback to feed the algorithms. Gamification, however, comes with its own challenges and its adoption in IR is still in its infancy. Given the enormous response to the first and second GamifIR workshops that were both co-located with ECIR, and the broad range of topics discussed, we now organized the third workshop at SIGIR 2016 to address a range of emerging challenges and opportunities

Gamification in Crowdsourcing: A Review

This study investigates how different gamification implementations can increase crowdsourcees' motivation and participation in crowdsourcing (CS). To this end, we review empirical literature that has investigated the use of gamification in crowdsourcing settings. Overall, the results of the review indicate that gamification has been an effective approach for increasing crowdsourcing participation. When comparing crowdcreating,-solving,-processing and-rating CS approaches, the results show differences in the use of gamification across CS types. Crowdsourcing initiatives that provide more monotonous tasks most commonly used mere points and other simpler gamification implementations, whereas CS initiatives that seek for diverse and creative contributions have employed gamification in more manifold ways employing a richer set of mechanics. These findings provide insights for designers of gamified systems and further research on the topics of gamification and crowdsourcing

The Gamification of Crowdsourcing Systems: Empirical Investigations and Design

Recent developments in modern information and communication technologies have spawned two rising phenomena, gamification and crowdsourcing, which are increasingly being combined into gamified crowdsourcing systems. While a growing number of organizations employ crowdsourcing as a way to outsource tasks related to the inventing, producing, funding, or distributing of their products and services to the crowd – a large group of people reachable via the internet – crowdsourcing initiatives become enriched with design features from games to motivate the crowd to participate in these efforts. From a practical perspective, this combination seems intuitively appealing, since using gamification in crowdsourcing systems promises to increase motivations, participation and output quality, as well as to replace traditionally used financial incentives. However, people in large groups all have individual interests and motivations, which makes it complex to design gamification approaches for crowds. Further, crowdsourcing systems exist in various forms and are used for various tasks and problems, thus requiring different incentive mechanisms for different crowdsourcing types. The lack of a coherent understanding of the different facets of gamified crowdsourcing systems and the lack of knowledge about the motivational and behavioral effects of applying various types of gamification features in different crowdsourcing systems inhibit us from designing solutions that harness gamification’s full potential. Further, previous research canonically uses competitive gamification, although crowdsourcing systems often strive to produce cooperative outcomes. However, the potentially relevant field of cooperative gamification has to date barely been explored. With a specific focus on these shortcomings, this dissertation presents several studies to advance the understanding of using gamification in crowdsourcing systems

Data-driven gamification design

Gamification has been attracted much interest, not only in the HCI community, in the last few years. However, there is still a lack of insights and theory on the relationships between game design elements, motivation, domain context and user behavior. In this workshop we want to discover the potentials of data-driven gamification design optimization, e.g. by the application of machine learning techniques on user interaction data in a certain domain

Tailoring a Points Scoring Mechanism for Crowd-Based Knowledge Pooling

We address the design of point scoring mechanisms in games for crowds, to promote user motivations to contribute knowledge. We measure the effectiveness of the scoring mechanism on users’ performance across three types of crowd: general public, students in their field of study, general students. The conditions were: reward-free games (control group) and two reward-based systems differing in the algorithm applied (linear y=3x vs. exponential y=6ex). Results support the importance of the mathematical function of scores assignment as a motivator for knowledge contribution, and indicate that the effect of the scoring mechanism design should be tailored according to the type of crowd. These findings provide insights for designers of gamified systems on how to improve knowledge contributions in crowd-based systems

A Gamification Framework for Sensor Data Analytics

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables connected objects to capture, communicate, and collect information over the network through a multitude of sensors, setting the foundation for applications such as smart grids, smart cars, and smart cities. In this context, large scale analytics is needed to extract knowledge and value from the data produced by these sensors. The ability to perform analytics on these data, however, is highly limited by the difficulties of collecting labels. Indeed, the machine learning techniques used to perform analytics rely upon data labels to learn and to validate results. Historically, crowdsourcing platforms have been used to gather labels, yet they cannot be directly used in the IoT because of poor human readability of sensor data. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a framework for sensor data analytics which leverages the power of crowdsourcing through gamification to acquire sensor data labels. The framework uses gamification as a socially engaging vehicle and as a way to motivate users to participate in various labelling tasks. To demonstrate the framework proposed, a case study is also presented. Evaluation results show the framework can successfully translate gamification events into sensor data labels