Anna Hannemann

Neurophysiological methods for monitoring brain activity in serious games and virtual environments: a review

The use of serious games and virtual environments for learning is increasing worldwide. These technologies have the potential to collect live data from users through game play and can be combined with neuroscientific methods such as EEG, fNIRS and fMRI. The several learning processes triggered by serious games are associated with specific patterns of activation that distributed in time and space over different neural networks. This paper explores the opportunities offered and challenges posed by neuroscientific methods when capturing user feedback and using the data to create greater user adaptivity in game. Existing neuroscientific studies examining cortical correlates of game-based learning do not form a common or homogenous field. In contrast, they often have disparate research questions and are represented through a broad range of study designs and game genres. In this paper, the range of studies and applications of neuroscientific methods in game-based learning are reviewed.

Community Dynamics in Open Source Software Projects: Aging and Social Reshaping

An undeniable factor for an open source software (OSS) project success is a vital community built around it. An OSS community not only needs to be established, but also to be persisted. This is not guaranteed considering the voluntary nature of participation in OSS. The dynamic analysis of the OSS community evolution can be used to extract indicators to rate the current stability of a community and to predict its future development. Despite the great amount of studies on mining project communication and development repositories, the evolution of OSS communities is rarely addressed. This paper presents an approach to analyze the OSS community history. We combine adapted demography measures to study community aging and social analysis to investigate the dynamics of community structures. The approach is applied to the communication and development history of three bioinformatics OSS communities over eleven years. First, in all three projects a survival rate pattern is identified. This finding allows us to define the minimal number of newcomers required for the further positive community growth. Second, dynamic social analysis shows that the node betweenness in combination with the network diameter can be used as an indicator for significant changes in the community core and the quality of community recovery after these modifications.

Der Bazar der Anforderungen

ZusammenfassungTraditionelles Requirements Engineering ist auf die Ermittlung, Festschreibung und Nachvollziehbarkeit von Anforderungen in den Informationssystemen einer Organisation fokussiert. Die fortschreitende Globalisierung und Vernetzung hat neue Formen der Zusammenarbeit und der informationstechnischen Unterstützung hervorgebracht. Auf Basis von zwei Fallstudien zu offenen Innovationsprozessen haben wir die Anforderungen an ein adaptives Requirements Engineering für emergente Communities ermittelt. Zur informatischen Unterstützung haben wir ein i*-Modell für die Beschreibung der wechselseitigen Abhängigkeiten zwischen den Communities und den von ihnen genutzten Informationssystemen aus der Sichtweise des adaptiven RE entwickelt. Wir unterstützen das adaptive RE durch einen Dienstbaukasten, der in die zu entwickelnden Informationssysteme integriert werden kann. Dadurch entsteht im Sinne der Open-Source-Bewegung ein Bazar von Anforderungen. Diesen Vorgang haben wir prototypisch in einen Store für webbasierte Widgets zur Gestaltung von personalisierten Lernumgebungen umgesetzt.

Learning by gaming: facts and myths

Gaming has undergone a transition from a niche hobby to a part of everyday culture. This transition, along with the advance in the use of the internet, has created a new kind of social environment, commonly known as virtual life. This paper presents the survey results of over 1000 gamers worldwide, in which they tell us how gaming affected their lives – both virtual and real – with regard to their career, relationships and social life. The analysis of the answers disproves common stereotypes about gamers, shows areas where gaming can very well be beneficial and where there are still problems.

Mobile Multimedia Management for Community-Aware Storytelling

Storytelling is a natural and effective approach to human communication. The enrichment of stories using multimedia technologies has been established in knowledge sharing for professional communities since long ago. However, mobile multimedia production and consumption for storytelling raises several issues for mobile data management. We start with a requirements analysis for various application scenarios ranging from business to common life with mobile multimedia storytelling. A mobile multimedia data management model is proposed based on the presented scenarios. A test bed for the measurement of mobile multimedia community information system success is briefly described for the evaluation of our approach.

A Longitudinal Study of Community-Oriented Open Source Software Development

End-users are often argued to be the source of innovation in Open Source Software (OSS). However, most of the existing empirical studies about OSS projects have been restricted to developer sub-communities only. In this paper, we address the question, if and under which conditions the requirements and ideas from end-users indeed influence the development processes in OSS. We present an approach for automated requirements elicitation process discovery in OSS communities. The empirical basis are three large-scale interdisciplinary OSS projects in bioinformatics, focusing on communication in the mailing lists and source code histories over ten years. Our study results in preliminary guidelines for the organization of community-oriented software development.

Virtual Campfire - Cross-Platform Services for Mobile Social Software

Advances in mobile communication technologies lead to a coalescence of location-based, multimedia services for user communities. However, easy development and maintenance of device-independent mobile services are still challenging. We have developed a service-oriented framework for mobile multimedia processing based on international standards like MPEG-7. Quality of mobile service experience is constantly monitored in framework. The scenario “Virtual Campfire” is used in the German excellence cluster UMIC (Ultra High-Speed Information and Communication) to demonstrate future mobile social software with real-time multimedia processing, semantic enrichment of multimedia materials by user communities and complex collaboration over the mobile we like storytelling on different mobile devices. Adaptive Web access, service calls and service monitoring are to be demonstrated as the prototype, which offers approaches to meeting the aforementioned challenges.

Navigation Support in Evolving Open-Source Communities by a Web-Based Dashboard

The co-evolution of communities and systems in open-source software (OSS) projects is an established research topic. There are plenty of different studies of OSS community and system evolution available. However, most of the existing OSS project visualization tools provide source code oriented metrics with little support for communities. At the same time, self-reflection helps OSS community members to understand what is happening within their community. Considering missing community-centered OSS visualizations, we investigated the following research question: Are the OSS communities interested in a visualization platform, which reflects community evolution? If so, what aspects should it reflect?

Soziale Interaktion in Open-Source-Communitys

ZusammenfassungenDas Projektmanagement von Open-Source-Software- (OSS- )Projekten findet fast ausschließlich webbasiert statt. Die medialen Spuren von Entwicklungsprozessen können als Basis für die Analyse des Einflusses zwischenmenschlicher Faktoren auf die OSS-Entwicklung genutzt werden. Durch statistische Auswertung der Mailinglisten von drei erfolgreichen OSS-Bioinformatikprojekten über einen Zeitraum von elf Jahren wurden Zusammenhänge zwischen Projektentwicklung und Kommunikation festgestellt sowie bedeutsame Gruppen und Generationswechsel innerhalb der Projektmitglieder aufgedeckt. Daraus lassen sich Hinweise für OSS-Fördermaßnahmen aus Sicht nutzender Unternehmen ableiten.