Vittorio Loreto, Physics Dept. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy and Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Torino, Italy and SONY Computer Science Lab, Paris, France

Participation, gaming and learning
Our societies are being transformed by the pervasive role technology is playing on our culture and everyday life, in a so deeply way that many refer to this phenomenon as the third industrial revolution. Techno-social systems is the locution more and more adopted to quickly refer to social systems in which technology entangles, in an original and unpredictable way, cognitive, behavioural and social aspects of human beings. Technology helps connecting people and circulating information, and affects more and more the way humans interact with each other. This framework is opening tremendous opportunity to address the challenges of our rapidly changing world. In this mini-course I'll review some of the progress we have been witnessing in the last few years and describe how the new tools are being deployed to understand our societies and eventually steer them in virtuous directions. More in particular I'll touch the following set of topics, by merging, in a unique framework, web-based experiments, data science and theoretical modeling. Citizen science and participatory sensing. One possible way to respond to the present societal challenges is that of pushing the evolution of ICT so that it can support informed action at the hyperlocal scale, providing capabilities for environmental monitoring, data aggregation and mining, and information presentation and sharing. Citizen Science: is a movement that capitalizes on the intersection of a motivated community of citizens and the vested interests of scientists to encourage participation in the conduct of science in the broadest sense. The goal is to provide a means of galvanising the support of individuals to benefit the conduct of science as well as developing a community that is aware, engaged and supportive of this work. Nowadays low-cost sensing technologies are being developed to allow citizens to directly assess the state of the environment; social networking tools allow effective data and opinion collection and real-time information sharing processes. Through the use of ICT tools deployed to gather user-generated and user-mediated information from web-based and mobile sensing devices knowledge, the social awareness and understanding of environmental issues and living conditions in urban habitats will be enhanced. Web-gaming, social computing and learning. In the last few years the Web has been progressively acquiring the status of an infrastructure for social computing that allows researchers to coordinate the cognitive abilities of users in online communities, and to suggest how to steer the collective action towards predefined goals. This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social-sciences and whenever the peculiar human computation abilities are crucially required for research purposes. There is a wide range of potential areas of interests going from opinion and language dynamics to decision making, innovation dynamics and creativity, geography, human mobility, economics, psychology, etc... Several examples will be described in this area. Finally playing has a natural link with learning. Play is the fundamental context for most human learning across ages: activities like exploration, experimentation, innovation, testing the limits, etc. all happens best when playing. The idea of linking playful activities with learning processes is gaining in importance also in our complex societies. I'll illustrate a few examples by highlightling how new protocols and algorithms for learning can be informed with extensive available data and coupled with web-based experiments. This mini-course will be coupled to an atelier about web-gaming held by Dr. Pietro Gravino. The atelier will adopt the Experimental Tribe platform for web-gaming and social computation (www.xtribe.eu). Students will be challenged to devise interesting games to explore specific research questions and guided through the first steps to implement them.

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Short bio:

Vittorio Loreto is Professor of Physics of Complex Systems at Sapienza University and Research Leader at the ISI Foundation in Turin where he coordinates the Information Dynamics group. He is now spending a sabbatical year at SONY Computer Science Lab in Paris. His scientific activity is mainly focused on the statistical physics of complex systems. In the last few years he has been active in the fields of granular media, complexity and information theory, complex networks theory, communication and language evolution. He coordinated several project at the EU level and he is presently coordinating the EU project EveryAware (http://www.everyaware.eu), devoted to enhancing environmental awareness in urban contexts using social information technologies. In this framework he has been developing new tools for web-gaming, social computation and learning. He is presently coordinating a Templeton funded project on "Unfolding the dynamics of creativity, novelties and innovation" (www.kreyon.net). He published over 130 papers in internationally refereed journals and chaired several workshops and conferences. He was the vice-chairman of STATPHYS 23, the 23rd International Conference on Statistical Physics.