Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR'14), in conjunction with ECIR'14

Gamification is the application of game mechanics, such as leader boards, badges or achievement points, in non-gaming environments with the aim to increase user engagement, data quality or cost effectiveness. A core aspect of gamification solutions is to infuse intrinsic motivations to participate by leveraging people's natural desires for achievement and competition. While gamification, on the one hand, is emerging as the next big thing in industry, e.g., an effective way to generate business, on the other hand, it is also becoming a major research area. However, its adoption in Information Retrieval (IR) is still in its infancy, despite the wide ranging IR tasks that may benefit from gamification techniques. These include the manual annotation of documents for IR evaluation, the participation in user studies to study interactive IR challenges, or the shift from single-user search to social search, just to mention a few.

This workshop focuses on the challenges and opportunities that gamification can present for the IR community. The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from a wide range of areas including game design, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, computer games, and natural language processing.

Topics of Interest

We invite the submission of position papers as well as novel research papers and demos addressing problems related to gamification in IR. Topics include but are not limited to:
- Gamification approaches in a variety of information-seeking contexts
- User engagement and motivational factors of gamification
- Player types, contests, cooperative games
- Challenges and opportunities of applying gamification in IR
- Gamification design and game mechanics
- Game based work and crowdsourcing
- Applications and prototypes
- Evaluation of gamification techniques
Submissions from outside the core IR community and from industry are actively encouraged.

Submission Details

All papers should be 2-5 pages long (in PDF format) following the ACM proceedings format and must be submitted electronically by 5 February 2014 through the EasyChair submission page:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gamifir2014

The submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the program committee. We are planning for a highly interactive workshop where all accepted papers will be presented in boaster+poster format.

Program Committee

Omar Alonso, Microsoft Research (USA)
Leif Azzopardi, University of Glasgow (United Kingdom)
Jon Chamberlain, University of Essex (United Kingdom)
Edwin Chen, YouTube/Google (USA)
Sebastian Deterding, Rochester Institute of Technology (USA)
Carsten Eickhoff, TU Delft (The Netherlands)
Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
Christopher G Harris, The University Of Iowa (USA)
Hideo Joho, University of Tsukuba (Japan)
Mounia Lalmas, Yahoo! Labs (Spain)
Edith Law, Harvard University (USA)
David Parks, Harvard University (USA)
Massimo Poesio, University of Essex (United Kingdom)
Falk Scholer, RMIT (Australia)
Elaine Toms, University of Sheffield (United Kingdom)
Arjen de Vries, CWI (The Netherlands)
Further members will be confirmed soon…

Organizing Committee

Frank Hopfgartner, TU Berlin (Germany)
Gabriella Kazai, Microsoft Research (United Kingdom)
Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex (United Kingdom)
Michael Meder, TU Berlin (Germany)

Important Dates

Submission: 5 February 2014
Notification: 5 March 2014
Camera-ready: 15 March 2014
Workshop: 13 April 2014