%0 Book Section %B Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness %D 2017 %T Large Scale Engagement Through Web-Gaming and Social Computations %A Vito D P Servedio %A Saverio Caminiti %A Pietro Gravino %A Vittorio Loreto %A Alina Sirbu %A Francesca Tria %X In the last few years the Web has progressively acquired the status of an infrastructure for social computation that allows researchers to coordinate the cognitive abilities of human agents, so to steer the collective user activity towards predefined goals. This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web-games as an alternative laboratory to run experiments in the social sciences and whenever the contribution of human beings can be effectively used for research purposes. Web-games introduce a playful aspect in scientific experiments with the result of increasing participation of people and of keeping their attention steady in time. The aim of this chapter is to suggest a general purpose web-based platform scheme for web-gaming and social computation. This platform will simplify the realization of web-games and will act as a repository of different scientific experiments, thus realizing a sort of showcase that stimulates users’ curiosity and helps researchers in recruiting volunteers. A platform built by following these criteria has been developed within the EveryAware project, the Experimental Tribe (XTribe) platform, which is operational and ready to be used. Finally, a sample web-game hosted by the XTribe platform will be presented with the aim of reporting the results, in terms of participation and motivation, of two different player recruiting strategies. %B Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness %I Springer %P 237–254 %G eng %U http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25658-0_12 %R 10.1007/978-3-319-25658-0_12 %0 Conference Paper %B Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Complex Information Systems %D 2016 %T Unveiling Political Opinion Structures with a Web-experiment %A Pietro Gravino %A Saverio Caminiti %A Alina Sirbu %A Francesca Tria %A Vito D P Servedio %A Vittorio Loreto %X The dynamics of political votes has been widely studied, both for its practical interest and as a paradigm of the dynamics of mass opinions and collective phenomena, where theoretical predictions can be easily tested. However, the vote outcome is often influenced by many factors beyond the bare opinion on the candidate, and in most cases it is bound to a single preference. The voter perception of the political space is still to be elucidated. We here propose a web experiment (laPENSOcos`ı) where we explicitly investigate participants’ opinions on political entities (parties, coalitions, individual candidates) of the Italian political scene. As a main result, we show that the political perception follows a Weber-Fechner-like law, i.e., when ranking political entities according to the user expressed preferences, the perceived distance of the user from a given entity scales as the logarithm of this rank. %B Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Complex Information Systems %@ 978-989-758-181-6 %G eng %U http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/Link.aspx?doi=10.5220/0005906300390047 %R 10.5220/0005906300390047 %0 Journal Article %J PLoS One %D 2015 %T Participatory Patterns in an International Air Quality Monitoring Initiative. %A Alina Sirbu %A Becker, Martin %A Saverio Caminiti %A De Baets, Bernard %A Elen, Bart %A Francis, Louise %A Pietro Gravino %A Hotho, Andreas %A Ingarra, Stefano %A Vittorio Loreto %A Molino, Andrea %A Mueller, Juergen %A Peters, Jan %A Ricchiuti, Ferdinando %A Saracino, Fabio %A Vito D P Servedio %A Stumme, Gerd %A Theunis, Jan %A Francesca Tria %A Van den Bossche, Joris %X

The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realization that the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This is possible by developing novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cost sensing devices, combined with a web-based game to monitor perceived levels of pollution. Measures of shift in perceptions over the course of the campaign are provided, together with insights into participatory patterns emerging from this study. Interesting effects related to inertia and to direct involvement in measurement activities rather than indirect information exposure are also highlighted, indicating that direct involvement can enhance learning and environmental awareness. In the future, this could result in better adoption of policies towards decreasing pollution.

%B PLoS One %V 10 %P e0136763 %8 2015 %G eng %R 10.1371/journal.pone.0136763 %0 Journal Article %J PLoS One %D 2013 %T Awareness and learning in participatory noise sensing. %A Becker, Martin %A Saverio Caminiti %A Fiorella, Donato %A Francis, Louise %A Pietro Gravino %A Haklay, Mordechai Muki %A Hotho, Andreas %A Vittorio Loreto %A Mueller, Juergen %A Ricchiuti, Ferdinando %A Vito D P Servedio %A Alina Sirbu %A Francesca Tria %X

The development of ICT infrastructures has facilitated the emergence of new paradigms for looking at society and the environment over the last few years. Participatory environmental sensing, i.e. directly involving citizens in environmental monitoring, is one example, which is hoped to encourage learning and enhance awareness of environmental issues. In this paper, an analysis of the behaviour of individuals involved in noise sensing is presented. Citizens have been involved in noise measuring activities through the WideNoise smartphone application. This application has been designed to record both objective (noise samples) and subjective (opinions, feelings) data. The application has been open to be used freely by anyone and has been widely employed worldwide. In addition, several test cases have been organised in European countries. Based on the information submitted by users, an analysis of emerging awareness and learning is performed. The data show that changes in the way the environment is perceived after repeated usage of the application do appear. Specifically, users learn how to recognise different noise levels they are exposed to. Additionally, the subjective data collected indicate an increased user involvement in time and a categorisation effect between pleasant and less pleasant environments.

%B PLoS One %V 8 %P e81638 %8 2013 %G eng %R 10.1371/journal.pone.0081638 %0 Conference Paper %B Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), 2013 Third International Conference on %D 2013 %T XTribe: a web-based social computation platform %A Saverio Caminiti %A Cicali, Claudio %A Pietro Gravino %A Vittorio Loreto %A Vito D P Servedio %A Alina Sirbu %A Francesca Tria %B Cloud and Green Computing (CGC), 2013 Third International Conference on %I IEEE %G eng %U http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6686061&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6686061 %R 10.1109/CGC.2013.69