Gaming in iSchools

The diversity of participants in the gaming discussion Tuesday morning at the iConference paralleled the broad range of research interests related to gaming.

Gaming enthusiasts and researchers representing geographic areas from Croatia to China to State College, Pennsylvania, gathered together to discover what others are doing in advancing gaming as increasingly significant field within iSchools.

Syracuse Professor Scott Nicholson and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Ian MacInnes led the discussion and described their recent research interests as they relate to gaming.

Nicholson heads a $1 million project that is examining the use of gaming in libraries to attract new patrons, mainly teen-agers and adults without children, and create a community hub. He and his research team are creating tools to assess the use of games in libraries and will make those assessment tools available to librarians across the globe through an online form.

Their responses will feed the data pool, which then can be analyzed and returned to game developers and others about the demographics of gamers in libraries.

Nicholson reported how a local Syracuse library instituted 14 new gaming events over the course of a year and how that activity not only attracted teens to the library, but also how those young people formed relationships with senior citizens who also took up gaming at the library.

MacInnes said his interest in gaming stemmed from the monetization of virtual worlds and the business model that was developing for companies to participate in these new spaces. One such idea was the development of paid advertising within virtual worlds—avatars drinking Coca-Cola or wearing Ralph Lauren, for example.

Others, such Ph.D. student Joey Lee from Penn State were interested in designing games for education use. One of his projects involved creating a game that would educate people about Asian American identities and fighting stereotypes.

Another researcher created serious games about health issues, such as getting college bound students to get their shots by showing a dorm filled with creepy crawlers ready to infect them. The idea, she said, was to ridicule the gamers who had not gotten their shots and creating peer pressure to do so.

The group also brainstormed ways in which the iSchools could bring something unique to gaming that other disciplines might not be able to do. Ideas ranged from educational uses to collaborative design to influencing game development and other areas that bring together multiple disciplines and perspectives.

Are blogs and social networking sites fair game for researchers?

For researchers, virtual environments and social networking sites are full of rich data that can be used in a number of ways—to better understand how communities/groups develop, how technology is being adopted to reach a variety of goals, and a host of other interdisciplinary research topics.

But what are the issues of ethics, privacy, and ownership that arise in harvesting this data?

People post information about themselves to sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, SecondLife, Twitter, and blogs—public sites with limited restrictions on access. So if people are willing to publish this information openly, can’t researchers use it?

It depends, according to participants involved in a session on online survey-based data collection led by Syracuse Associate Dean Jeff Stanton and Ph.D. student Aggie Kwiatkowska.

Several regulations, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and institutional review board (IRB) guidelines, limits the use of data—particularly qualitative information—that can be traced back to a specific individual.

Some researchers said they try to develop their own online communities with volunteers who are willing to participate, but the work and resources that go into building the community takes away from the research they hope to conduct in this space. It’s also a controlled environment as opposed to the more natural environments such as Facebook.

Another researcher raised the issue of why blogs can’t be quoted like any other published article or book, and another wondered if student work that is posted on a public space such as blog or web site can be used in research or if that violates IRB or FERPA rules.

Panelists said these questions are currently being answered on a case-by-case basis, and that there is no black and white when it comes to these emerging social networking spaces.

Can Internet access reduce corruption worldwide?

Syracuse Professor Martha Garcia-Murillo wants to know if access and use of the Internet can reduce corruption globally. She presented preliminary findings of data collected from 180 countries that clearly identified political and economic factors, which directly correlated to corruption.

The more politically unstable a country, the more incidents of corruption there are, she said. As a country’s wealth increases, corruption decreases. As press within a country becomes more empowered and free, the incidents of corruption within that country decrease.

But when it came to Internet use, the results weren’t as clear. The results were all over the map. But why?

Garcia-Murillo suggested that in developing countries, the Internet is not considered a credible source. Many of these countries also have low rates of Internet use. Also, people are being overwhelmed with information, including information from governments. This information overload can distract people from noticing what information is missing or from finding the information that might show incongruities.

Illegal downloading among college students study

College students today are savvy and know how to find what they want online including copyrighted music, music, and software downloads. But just how pervasive is this problem and how are accessing these file?

Syracuse iSchool Associate Dean for Research Jeff Stanton and Ph.D. student Isabelle Fagnot led a study at Syracuse University to find out. They interviewed a small sample of nine undergraduates to do some preliminary information gathering, and then conducted a larger anonymous paper survey of 164 students, and an even larger web-based survey of 404 students.

They asked students a series of questions hoping to determine whether they were downloading copyrighted material, uploading this material, or sharing files only with friends on an individual basis.

They discovered that about 3/4 of students were participating in peer-to-peer downloading, about ½ were downloading software, 1/3 were sharing with friends, and about 13 percent were uploading copyrighted content for others to download.

One of the most interesting findings of his study was that students who were most aware of the illegal nature of downloading copyrighted materials were also the most likely to engage in the behavior. Also, the better educated a student that he was in information security, the more likely he was to share files with his peers.

Stanton also asked students to suggest ways that the university can help prevent students from doing this, and passed that information along to university.

Attendees at the iConference also suggested ways that universities can prevent this, including following the library model, of licensing music that students could access.

Little eScience, Big eScience

eScience goes by many names, including cyberinfrastructure, but its basic meaning is the same: It is the use of information and communications technology (ICT) to support scientific work. ICTs enable research progress by providing access to data, resources, and people. Science is changing and becoming more reliant on digital resources.

Many people are familiar with “big eScience”—these are large, well-funded projects with many researchers that are all working toward the same goal, such as the human genome project to map and identify human genes or the physicists who work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

“Big eScience” researchers share data with each other, use the same tools, and are consistent in building repositories of their work. They get large, sometimes international grants to support their work.

Little eScience, on the other hand, involves perhaps only a couple researchers—a professor and a graduate assistant, and explore issues and new theories. The ICT issues for “Little eScience” researchers are different. These people generally are more protective of their data, and the tools and metadata they use vary from researcher to researcher.

Syracuse professors Steve Sawyer and Kevin Crowston and Ph.D. student Andrea Wiggins examined the differences between little and big eScience access to data, resources, and people, and suggested ways in which little eScience researchers could take steps to build their digital support systems.

For example, Wiggins suggested little eScientists create metadata standards, use analysis workflows, and build preprint repositories of their research. But she also said that there needs to be incentives and input of funding and human resources for these changes to occur.

The Pros and Cons of Automating the Tracking of Suspicious Behavior Online

Technology can be used to help track and catch criminals, ranging from terrorists and organized criminals to those who commit credit card fraud. But a national platform would be a more comprehensive solution to flagging suspicious behavior and preventing crimes as well as apprehending criminals.

Similar technology is currently being used to track Internet-users behavior online—what sites they visit, what they purchase, what they search for, and sometimes even where they’re located when using the Internet. But what is the feasibility of developing a national platform to flag suspicious behavior? What would be the social implications of such a technological solution?

Moderating by Syracuse doctoral students Joe Treglia and Shuyuan Mary Ho, a panel of intelligence, fraud detection, and academic experts discussed this notion of a national behavioral anomaly detection platform.

Treglia and Ho explained that the platform would provide a “statistical firewall” by creating a system of automated analysis of data indicating incidents of malicious behavior, patterns, or activities across a wide variety of industries. The system would employ spider technologies and data mining to pull relevant information from such sources as banks, telephone companies, airlines, and Internet service providers.


Much of the discussion focused on the public perception of such a tool and the threat it posed to individual privacy. Although some retailers currently track people’s behaviors online to better target their marketing without too much resistance from the public, participant doubted the public would be as permissive with law enforcement agencies collecting similar information.

For the information to be useful to a law enforcement agency, the data has to be tracked to a specific individual. The public would have to be aware and approve of such tracking, and even then, some question the ethics of doing so.

“I told my children that I would read their text logs, so they knew I’d be checking up on them,” Treglia said. “But I think halfway through the day, they forget about that. I think the same thing could happen here.”

Medical Informatics in iSchools

For children who have chronic diseases, the transition to adulthood brings a range of information management issues. Until this point, the parents have considered themselves the owner of their child’s complete medical history—pulling together all of their personal observations as well as the treatments by numerous doctors and specialists over the span of their child’s life.

Transferring medical history information from pediatricians to adult-care physicians as well as from the parents to the patient presents medical informatics challenges. This example, presented by Syracuse Professor Carsten Osterlund, is one of many discussed in a roundtable discussion, iSchool Health and Medical Research Initiatives and Opportunities, on February 9.

With U.S. President Barack Obama pledging to fund projects in medical informatics and transferring paper records into electronic medical records, iSchool faculty and students were interested in sharing information and building relationships to support their research in this area.

Genetics, patient perception, collaborative information behavior in health care teams, aging, emergency medical management, community health information, pharmaceutical connections, accessibility and access technology, and social networking and gaming in medicine were all topics of interest to those in attendance.

Professor Ellen Detlefsen of the University of Pittsburgh outlined what she considered to be “success factors” in building medical informatics research projects, including:
· One or more full-time faculty members focused on health information
· A medical or health science faculty nearby, preferably within a medical school
· Access to large academic health sciences library
· Other medical informatics research underway within the same university
· Personal, professional, and electronic links among the previous four factors

Associate Dean of Rutger’s iSchool Hartmut Mokros and Professor Madhu Reddy of Penn State said one of the challenges is understanding the language used in health information and finding the parallels to your research interests. Each discipline or field of medicine has its own language, so Mokros suggested focusing on the problem to find collaborations, rather than the discipline.

“I noticed there’s a lot of interest at the dean’s level and maybe a few Ph.D. students,” Osterlund said. “I bet there’s a lot of faculty here that didn’t come because they don’t see themselves in ‘medical informatics.’”

Faculty avoid labeling themselves, so the field within the iSchool needs to define itself as something broader than medicine, presenters said. These medical informatics projects pull together security, sociotechnology, information retrieval, information architecture, and information management, among many others of interest to iSchool faculty members.

Osterlund suggested that the iSchools create some form of formal connection around this topic—whether that is themed around funding proposals, or social networking on Facebook or elsewhere. It was then suggested to include medical informatics programs that are not located within iSchools, or making joint appointments with these individuals to iSchool faculties.