User-generated Events Research Articles

Representation of Events and Rules in Gamification Systems

The paper proposes a domain-agnostic description of user-generated events which conveys their key properties of relevance for gamification (i.a. context, actor, action, object, location and time) and a notation, based on this description, which allows to effectively specify gamification rules depending only on the content of the generated stream of events. This way, no hooks have to be inserted in the gamified system other than reporting of basic events happening within it.The proposed notation allows to design gamification rules that can be applied to different gamified systems, only provided they can generate event reports using the proposed representation (and belong to the same domain so that the rules remain relevant). It also simplifies building of rule-processing systems that serve various gamified systems. It is especially useful for complex gamification systems with multiple sources of rules and multiple points of their processing.

User-Generated Social Media Events in Tourism

Social media and mobile technologies have revolutionised communication and particular attention has been given to user-generated content (UGC) and the formation of online communities; however, little attention has been given to tourist events entirely generated by users through social media. This paper aims to define and characterise the phenomenon of tourism user-generated events (UGEs) through social media around the user’s new empowered role and to assess user-generated social media events’ online socialness. It is also our aim to provide a useful mixed-methodology analysis framework for UGEs in relation to social media and to highlight their interest for organisations. The methodological approach includes a quantitative model to store, analyse and compare events’ online socialness, which is combined with qualitative, participant observation at the events. This approach is applied to the analysis of three Instagram meetups organised by a specific online community at Catalan ski resorts. The paper’s results show the differential characteristic of tourism UGEs: user initiative and empowerment, full organisation and structure, great social media use and UGC production, brand dissemination, attraction capacity, strong online community bond and faithfulness. With UGEs, an event management paradigm shift occurs as organisations are no longer the main initiators and controllers of the event.

The Goal Behind the Action

Human activity is almost always intentional, be it in a physical context or as part of an interaction with a computer system. By understanding why user-generated events are happening and what purposes they serve, a system can offer a significantly improved and more engaging experience. However, goals cannot be easily captured. Analyzing user actions such as clicks and purchases can reveal patterns and behaviors, but understanding the goals behind these actions is a different and challenging issue. Our work presents a unified, multidisciplinary viewpoint for goal management that covers many different cases where goals can be used and techniques with which they can be exploited. Our purpose is to provide a common reference point to the concepts and challenging tasks that need to be formally defined when someone wants to approach a data analysis problem from a goal-oriented point of view. This work also serves as a springboard to discuss several open challenges and opportunities for goal-oriented approaches in data management, analysis, and sharing systems and applications.

Mining the IPTV Channel Change Event Stream to Discover Insight and Detect Ads

IPTV has been widely deployed throughout the world, bringing significant advantages to users in terms of the channel offering, video on demand, and interactive applications. One aspect that has been often neglected is the ability of precise and unobtrusive telemetry. TV set-top boxes that are deployed in modern IPTV systems can be thought of as capable sensor nodes that collect vast amounts of data, representing both the user activity and the quality of service delivered by the system itself. In this paper we focus on the user-generated events and analyze how the data stream of channel change events received from the entire IPTV network can be mined to obtain insight about the content. We demonstrate that it is possible to predict the occurrence of TV ads with high probability and show that the approach could be extended to model the user behavior and classify the viewership in multiple dimensions.

Event Capture and Analysis Tools for Graphic User Interfaces

This was a demonstration of a set of tools used to: 1) compare and evaluate software applications and prototypes; 2) evaluate documentation and instructional material; and 3) process video tape recordings of human-computer interaction (HCI). These tools include an event capture tool, which records events related to objects in graphical user interfaces, data filtering tools, which translate and aggregate user-generated events into meaningful characterizations of the interaction, and a multimedia data analyzer, which couples event logs and video recordings from HCI testing sessions.