Angeliki Antoniou

Personality Matters: Balancing for Personality Types Leads to Better Outcomes for Crowd Teams

When personalities clash, teams operate less effectively. Personality differences affect face-to-face collaboration and may lower trust in virtual teams. For relatively short-lived assignments, like those of online crowdsourcing, personality matching could provide a simple, scalable strategy for effective team formation. However, it is not clear how (or if) personality differences affect teamwork in this novel context where the workforce is more transient and diverse. This study examines how personality compatibility in crowd teams affects performance and individual perceptions. Using the DISC personality test, we composed 14 five-person teams (N=70) with either a harmonious coverage of personalities (balanced) or a surplus of leader-type personalities (imbalanced). Results show that balancing for personality leads to significantly better performance on a collaborative task. Balanced teams exhibited less conflict and their members reported higher levels of satisfaction and acceptance. This work demonstrates a simple personality matching strategy for forming more effective teams in crowdsourcing contexts.

An approach for serious game development for cultural heritage: Case study for an archaeological site and museum

The unique aspects of different places seem to require games of different characteristics. This paper describes the initial steps of an attempt to design games for different places of cultural heritage and consists of three parts. In the first part, the descriptive model to be used as a classification method for games of different characteristics for cultural heritage sites is presented. In the second part, the model is used for the creation of different cultural heritage games. Finally, the third part presents a detailed case study of one of the developed games, showing the implementation and user testing processes as well as its efficiency in terms of education and visit motivation.

Gaming and Cognitive Profiles for Recommendations in Museums

This paper presents an approach to enhance museum visitors experience through the use of Gaming, Social Networks, and Recommendations. The originality of the dedicated social and mobile visit personalisation system is that it relies on both the users cognitive profile and his interests, inferred from a game on Facebook.

A Fast Pace Method for Involving Children in Edutainment-Technology Design

Aiming at edutainment technologies for museums, elements of participatory design techniques and focus groups were combined under the theoretical framework of the cycle of creative imagination in order to involve 10 year-old children in the design process of such applications. In contrast to existing practices where children are called to evaluate games designed by adults, the proposed method involves children from the initial phases of development. The main advantage of the proposed method is its short duration (1-2 school days) allowing for its wide use. The distinct steps of the method assist children in visualizing the possibilities of using new technologies in museums. The method was tested with children in a primary school. The ideas produced by the children demonstrated their ability to generate concepts and inspire the development of new gaming technologies.

How Do Different Cognitive Styles Affect Learning Programming? Insights from a Game-Based Approach in Greek Schools

Is there any relationship between students’ cognitive style and the ability to learn programming through serious games? The aim of this work is to assess the learning effectiveness and motivational appeal of digital games for learning basic programming concepts, involving secondary education students. For this purpose, the Code.org®’s activity named K-8 Intro to Computer Science was used. The study investigated students’ attitudes from gaming activities to reveal the quality of their learning experience. Next, students’ attitudes from games were correlated with their cognitive profile to reveal potential differences. Finally, students’ performance from the digital games was assessed to reveal game-based learning (GBL) effectiveness compared to their cognitive styles. In the study, 77 students of two Greek high schools participated in the context of the European Code Week. The results suggest that these specific games, or similar educational computer games, can be exploited as effective and motivational learning environments within schools, as they provide a high-quality learning experience. Cognitive style was found to be a significant learning characteristic that should be taken into consideration when using digital games to learn programming.

Interconnecting Objects, Visitors, Sites and (Hi)Stories Across Cultural and Historical Concepts: The CrossCult Project

Human History, is a huge mesh of interrelated facts and concepts, spanning beyond borders, encompassing global aspects and finally constituting a shared, global experience. This is especially the case regarding European history, which is highly interconnected by nature; however, most History-related experiences that are today offered to the greater public, from schools to museums, are siloed. The CrossCult project aims to provide the means for offering citizens and cultural venue visitors a more holistic view of history, in the light of cross-border interconnections among pieces of cultural heritage, other citizens viewpoints and physical venues. To this end, the CrossCult project will built a comprehensive knowledge base encompassing information and semantic relationships across cultural information elements, and will provide the technological means for delivering the contents of this knowledge base to citizens and venue visitors in a highly personalized manner, creating narratives for the interactive experiences that maximise situational curiosity and serendipitous learning. The CrossCult platform will also exploit the cognitive/emotional profiles of the participants as well as temporal, spatial and miscellaneous features of context, including holidays and anniversaries, social media trending topics and so forth.

Personalized augmented reality experiences in museums using Google Cardboards

In this paper we examine the suitability of the Google Cardboard as a means for the delivery of personalized cultural experiences. Specifically, we develop the content and create the application required in order to provide highly personalized visits to the Archaeological Museum in Tripolis, Greece. We also examine the usability issues related to the use of Google Cardboards. Early results are promising, and based on them we also outline the next steps ahead.

User Profiling: Towards a Facebook Game that Reveals Cognitive Style

This paper presents an innovative approach based on social-network gaming, which will extract players’ cognitive styles for personalization purposes. Cognitive styles describe the way individuals think, perceive and remember information and can be exploited to personalize user interaction. Questionnaires are usually employed to identify cognitive styles, a tedious process for most users. Our approach relies on a Facebook game for discovering potential visitors’ cognitive styles with an ultimate goal of enhancing the overall visitors’ experience in the museum. By hosting such a game on the museum’s webpage and on Facebook, the museum aims to attract new visitors, as well as to support the user profiling process.

The CrossCult Knowledge Base: A Co-inhabitant of Cultural Heritage Ontology and Vocabulary Classification

CrossCult is an EU-funded research project aiming to spur a change in the way European citizens appraise History, fostering the re-interpretation of what they may have learnt in the light of cross-border interconnections among pieces of cultural heritage, other citizens’ viewpoints and physical venues. Exploiting the expressive power, reasoning and interoperability capabilities of semantic technologies, the CrossCult Knowledge Base models and semantically links desperate pieces of Cultural Heritage information, contributing significantly to the aims of the project. This paper presents the structure, design rationale and development of the CrossCult Knowledge Base, aiming to inform researchers in Digital Heritage about the challenges and opportunities of semantically modelling Cultural Heritage data.

Social network profiling for cultural heritage: combining data from direct and indirect approaches

The work argues for quick profiling methods from social networks for use in cultural heritage applications. Explicit (inquiries about user actions, like game playing) and implicit (observations from user actions on social networks) methods are tested, in an attempt to extract user personality profiles and in particular cognitive style profiles, using the MBTI tool. Qualitative and quantitative approaches have been applied to validate the results. So far, it seems that users’ cognitive profiles can be predicted from social media observations and user actions (i.e., playing games) for 3 out of the 4 MBTI dimensions. There seem to be relatively accurate predictions for the dimensions Judging–Perceiving and Extraversion–Introversion. Sensing–Intuition is a little more difficult to predict. Currently, the Thinking–Feeling dimension cannot be predicted from the existing data. Future works will concentrate on improving the prediction rate for the Sensing–Intuition dimensions and discovering ways to predict the Thinking–Sensing dimension from social network information.