A social scientific framework for social systems in online video games: Building a better looking for raid loot system in World of Warcraft

This paper examines social behavior in the online video game World of Warcraft. Specifically focusing on one element of social design: the behavior of players in the first release of Looking-for-Raid (LFR) loot system of World of Warcraft. It uses lens of economic game theory, combined with Williams (2010) mapping principle and a modern theoretical account of human decision-making, to explore how theory about individual interactions in well-defined contexts (games) can explain collective behavior. It provides some support for this theoretical approach with an examination of data collected as part of an ethnographic study, through focus groups, and a survey distributed to 333 World of Warcraft players. It concludes with a discussion of the results and some guidelines for predicting collective outcomes in certain types of online games using the introduced framework.     

Time,engagement and video games: How game design elements shape the temporalities of play in massively multiplayer online role-playing games

Researchers and developers constantly seek novel ways to create engaging applications that are able to retain their users over the long term, make them desire to spend time using the application or go back to using it after a break. With this aim, video games can be an insightful source of inspiration, as they are specifically designed to maximise playing time, increase players' intentions of playing during the day or enhance their willingness to replay. In a gaming context, ‘time’ is an important factor for engagement because game designers can design the game time to retain players in the game environment. Drawing on social practice theory, which is increasingly used in Information Systems (IS) research, I conducted an ethnographic study in World of Warcraft (WoW) to understand how various temporalities are produced within a video game and the effects that they have on players' engagement. The findings show that game temporalities stem from the complex interaction between the design features of the game and the norms, routines and expectations that are part of the game practices. Moreover, these temporalities can engender temporal experiences that may stimulate engagement in various ways. The study contributes to IS literature by proposing a novel understanding of how time can be intentionally designed to sustain user engagement. Finally, it suggests that ‘time design’ in video games could inspire designs in broader IS contexts, such as in the gamification of online communities, crowdsourcing platforms and crowd working systems.     

A framework for unified digital evidence management in security convergence

Digital Forensics is being actively researched and performed in various areas against changing IT environment such as mobile phone, e-commerce, cloud service and video surveillance. Moreover, it is necessary to research unified digital evidence management for correlation analysis from diverse sources. Meanwhile, various triage approaches have been developed to cope with the growing amount of digital evidence being encountered in criminal cases, enterprise investigations and military contexts. Despite of debating over whether triage inspection is necessary or not, it will be essential to develop a framework for managing scattered digital evidences. This paper presents a framework with unified digital evidence management for appropriate security convergence, which is based on triage investigation. Moreover, this paper describes a framework in network video surveillance system to shows how it works as an unified evidence management for storing diverse digital evidences, which is a good example of security convergence.     

An institutional analysis of software teams

Modern software is constructed by teams of software developers. The central question that this paper addresses is what policies should be enacted for structuring software teams to enhance cooperative as opposed to self-serving behavior? The contribution of this paper is in viewing software teams as being subject to a set of well-understood collective action problems: there are individual incentives to receive the joint rewards for a team-developed software project without contributing a fair share to its development. In this paper, an institutional analysis perspective is used in presenting a set of theoretical principles and an analytical framework recently developed in game theory, political economy, experimental economics, and natural resource governance for the understanding and resolution of these collective action problems. The principles and analysis framework are applied to an empirical case study of software teamwork within an academic setting. This case study shows, first, how to apply the analytic framework on an actual collective action situation. Second, it demonstrates how the theoretical understandings can be used as a basis to account for outcomes within this setting. And third, it provides an example of a particular institutional arrangement that elicits high levels of cooperation and low levels of free riding within a real-world setting. Understanding the importance of institutions for shaping individual and social behavior within software development teams makes these institutions more amenable to intentional human design.     

BallotShare: An exploration of the design space for digital voting in the workplace

Digital voting is used to support group decision-making in a variety of contexts ranging from politics to mundane everyday collaboration, and the rise in popularity of digital voting has provided an opportunity to re-envision voting as a social tool that better serves democracy. A key design goal for any group decision-making system is the promotion of participation, yet there is little research that explores how the features of digital voting systems themselves can be shaped to configure participation appropriately. In this paper we propose a framework that explores the design space of digital voting from the perspective of participation. We ground our discussion in the design of a social media polling tool called BallotShare; a first instantiation of our proposed framework designed to facilitate the study of decision-making practices in a workplace environment. Across five weeks, participants created and took part in non-standard polls relating to events and other spontaneous group decisions. Following interviews with participants we identified significant drivers and limitations of individual and collective participation in the voting process: social visibility, social inclusion, commitment and delegation, accountability, influence and privacy.     

An evaluation framework for software crowdsourcing

Recently software crowdsourcing has become an emerging area of software engineering. Few papers have presented a systematic analysis on the practices of software crowdsourcing. This paper first presents an evaluation framework to evaluate software crowdsourcing projects with respect to software quality, costs, diversity of solutions, and competition nature in crowdsourcing. Specifically, competitions are evaluated by the min-max relationship from game theory among participants where one party tries to minimize an objective function while the other party tries to maximize the same objective function. The paper then defines a game theory model to analyze the primary factors in these minmax competition rules that affect the nature of participation as well as the software quality. Finally, using the proposed evaluation framework, this paper illustrates two crowdsourcing processes, Harvard-TopCoder and AppStori. The framework demonstrates the sharp contrasts between both crowdsourcing processes as participants will have drastic behaviors in engaging these two projects.     

Designing for collaboration: a study in intergenerational social game design

This paper presents a study of a computer game designed for the elderly, allowing them to train their memory while playing the game. The game supports both a single-player and a multiplayer mode, in which the elderly can play with their friends or family using an embedded video chat application. The main question that is addressed in this paper is how the elderly gamers’ experience is influenced by the possibility to communicate directly with the other players. The study presents a comparison of the game experience and appreciation of older users and their (grand)children playing the game together, with or without the video chat application. Most importantly, the study shows that the added value of video chat is not limited to social contact, but that it also provides opportunities for the younger generation to assist the elderly during the game. In conclusion, the paper points out some intergenerational game design implications, and some future research suggestions.     

What makes good games go viral? The role of technology use,efficacy, emotion and enjoyment in players’ decision to share a prosocial digital game

Serious digital games may be an effective tool for prosocial message dissemination because they offer technology and experiences that encourage players to share them with others, and spread virally. But little is known about the factors that predict players’ willingness to share games with others in their social network. This panel study explores how several factors, including sharing technology use, emotional responses, and game enjoyment, contribute to players’ decision to share the game Darfur is Dying, with others. College students played the game and completed questionnaires that assessed whether they had shared the games at two different time points: during game play and after game play. Positive emotions predicted sharing while students played the game, but negative emotions predicted whether the game was shared after initial game play. Game enjoyment predicted players’ intentions to share the game, but it did not predict actual sharing behavior. Neither players’ general use of sharing technologies nor their satisfaction related to sharing digital content predicted sharing intentions or behavior. These findings have implications for the study of viral social marketing campaigns, and serious game design and theory.     

Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework: Designing Strategic Configurations of Crowdsourcing for the Emergency Management Domain

Crowdsourcing is not a new practice but it is a concept that has gained substantial attention during recent disasters. Drawing from previous work in the crisis informatics, disaster sociology, and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) literature, this paper first explains recent conceptualizations of crowdsourcing and how crowdsourcing is a way of leveraging disaster convergence. The CSCW concept of “articulation work” is introduced as an interpretive frame for extracting the salient dimensions of “crisis crowdsourcing.” Then, a series of vignettes are presented to illustrate the evolution of crisis crowdsourcing that spontaneously emerged after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and evolved to more established forms of public engagement during crises. The best practices extracted from the vignettes clarified the efforts to formalize crisis crowdsourcing through the development of innovative interfaces designed to support the articulation work needed to facilitate spontaneous volunteer efforts. Extracting these best practices led to the development of a conceptual framework that unpacks the key dimensions of crisis crowdsourcing. The Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework is a systematic, problem-driven approach to determining the why, who, what, when, where, and how aspects of a crowdsourcing system. The framework also draws attention to the social, technological, organizational, and policy (STOP) interfaces that need to be designed to manage the articulation work involved with reducing the complexity of coordinating across these key dimensions. An example of how to apply the framework to design a crowdsourcing system is offered with a discussion on the implications for applying this framework as well as the limitations of this framework. Innovation is occurring at the social, technological, organizational, and policy interfaces enabling crowdsourcing to be operationalized and integrated into official products and services.     

数字视频监控系统的设计与实现

本文首先对数字视频监控系统进行了介绍,然后从系统的硬件和软件实现两个方面对数字视频监控系统进行系统设计,给出了相应的总体框架设计方案和视频网络传输模型。     

The Librarian as Video Game Player

Despite media coverage that is usually negative or non-existent, digital (video) game playing is a major form of entertainment for significant numbers of people in developed countries. This paper begins with a brief outline of what these games are, who plays them and why there is interest within the library community. We then move through several examples of the current direct impact of digital games on libraries. This is followed by more abstract examples of how video games could, and do, influence library practise and technology. Attributes of online games are discussed, focusing on one particular game, Second Life. This game is used widely within the library community, with many librarians spending significant time developing avatars, open services and infrastructure. The paper concludes with a summary of the ten attributes of video game players, found across the research literature body, that are of relevance to digital information and library services.     

Software crowdsourcing for developing Software-as-a-Service

Recently software crowdsourcing has become a viable development paradigm for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ecosystems. TopCoder, one of the largest competitive programming communities, enables enterprises to tap into its global talent pool and crowdsource a variety of SaaS development tasks including requirement analysis, architecture design, code, and testing. Many researchers have proposed auction-based modelling methods to characterize general software crowdsourcing. But there are few papers on the comprehensive analysis of SaaS crowdsourcing process and developer community.This paper introduces a holistic analysis framework to model the SaaS-oriented software crowdsourcing from two dimensions: individual behavior in crowdsourcing contests and collective competition in the community. The framework includes a game-theoretical model to describe the competitive nature of software crowdsourcing process. Moreover, the framework defines a competition network to characterize the topological properties of a crowdsourcing community for SaaS development. The analysis of this model indicates that the success of a competitive software crowdsourcing project essentially depends upon the networks of key participants with sufficient skills and dedication for the project. This is validated by a large historical data collected from the Top-Coder website over a ten-year period.     

战场电视侦察系统中视频压缩技术及其DSP实现

数字视频压缩是多媒体应用中的关键技术。该文针对战场电视侦察系统的需求提出了一种可行的MPEG-4视频编解码方案,阐述了基于数字信号处理器ADSP21160、数字视频采集芯片Bt829、数字视频合成芯片ADV7175的硬件设计电路以及MPEG-4视频压缩标准的软件程序的算法及其实现。实验表明该文提出的MPEG-4视频编解码器设计方案是可行的。     

Unified modeling for digital twin of a knowledge-based system design

While Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) improves the ambiguity problem of the conventional document-based way, it brings management complexity. Faced with the complexity, one of the core issues that companies care about is how to effectively evaluate, predict, and manage it in the early system design stage. The inaccuracy of contemporary complexity measurement approaches still exits due to the inconsistency between the actual design process in physical space and the theoretical simulation in virtual space. Digital Twin (DT) provides a promising way to alleviate the problem by bridging the physical space and virtual space. Aiming to integrate DT with MBSE for the system design complexity analysis and prediction, based on previous work, an integration framework named System Design Digital Twin in 5 Dimensions was introduced from a knowledge perspective. The framework provides services for design complexity measurement, effort estimation, and change propagation prediction. Then, to represent the system design digital twin in a unified way, a modeling profile is constructed through SysML stereotypes. The modeling profile includes System design digital model in virtual space profile, system services profile, relationships profile and digital twin data profile. Finally, the system design of a cube-satellite space mission demonstrates the proposed unfiled modeling approach.     

IP网中视频终端的自适应缓冲控制

IP网的数字电视业务应用近年来随着网络技术的飞速进步得到了发展。在这种实时应用中,为进一步减小由IP网传输带来的延时抖动和拥塞对终端视频播放质量造成的影响,该文提出了一种根据视频终端缓冲区容量大小自适应丢帧或重播帧的细粒度缓冲控制机制,使终端缓冲区始终保持在稳定的区域内,同时保证在实施该机制的过程中不影响播放质量。该机制在实践中取得很好的效果,有效地达到了预期的目的。     

An impactful crowdsourcing intermediary design - a case of a service imagery crowdsourcing system

Crowdsourcing is usually implemented using an intermediary organization or directly coordinated by solution seekers. For those using an IT-based crowdsourcing intermediary, the important factors of intermediaries that impact the crowdsourcing outcome are yet unclear. In addition, little research was conducted on how to design a crowdsourcing intermediary that can address the combined challenges of considering different cognitive demand levels of solution providers’ contributions, combining contributions and evaluating contributions. This paper identifies three important factors and provides a novel design of crowdsourcing intermediary to cope with these challenges. This study uses a case that focuses on how to assist small and medium businesses (SMBs) to develop their service imageries in triggering service innovation and designing their service experiences as to fulfill the desired outcomes of customers. Through the case, the benefits of our crowdsourcing intermediary design are demonstrated and justified. The three important factors are the crowdsourcing intermediary knowledge base, generative networks and empowerment of crowd members. This study shows that the crowdsourcing process can facilitate achieving a higher chance of attaining creative solutions for SMBs’ innovation problems when the three factors are well incorporated and managed within the crowdsourcing intermediary design. This study also presents a novel design of crowdsourcing intermediary that can address the combined challenges of coping with different cognitive demand levels of crowd members and combining and evaluating crowd members’ contributions, in order to attain impactful crowdsourcing outcome.     

基于H.264与新一代视频编码标准的压缩域视频水印综述

数字水印技术为视频传输、视频共享以及一些扩展视频服务中存在的诸多问题提供了一种有效的解决途径,属于信息隐藏领域,它的基本思想是通过在数字媒体信号中嵌入一定量的附加信息,例如作品的所有权、使用权或者公司的标识等,实现信息管理或保护的目的。H.264是当前广泛使用的视频编码标准,它采用混合编码框架,包括帧内预测、帧间预测、变换、量化、自适应熵编码等模块。视频信号的数据量庞大、带宽高、冗余信息多,基本上都是以压缩的格式存储的特性,使得在视频中嵌入数字水印更为困难。这些特征使得视频水印在水印容量、水印复杂度以及结合压缩域处理操作等方面的要求比其他多媒体信号更高,因此,视频水印除了要满足数字水印的一般要求,如安全性、鲁棒性、隐藏性等特性之外,还有一些独特的技术要求。本文对压缩域视频水印相关技术进行了分析并对研究方法进行了讨论,提出了目前存在的问题及未来研究的方向。     

Open Data,Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics. A case study on civic participation in the digital age

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the dynamics of civic participation, media agency, and data practices. To do so we analyse an investigative journalism story run by The Guardian that combined open data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics with the purpose of engaging readers. The case study highlights how data can be made accessible to people who usually do not have access; how game mechanics can be deployed in order to foster civic participation by offering users a sense of autonomy, competence and relatedness; and how crowdsourcing can organise a large group of people into achieving a common goal. The combination of these three elements resulted in a case for civic participation in the digital era.