GAS 2022 - 6th International ICSE Workshop on Games and Software Engineering: Engineering fun, inspiration, and motivation

May 20, 2022


REGISTRATION LINK


WORKSHOP PROGRAM

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Keynote #1: The key role of dynamic and integrated learning

The set of notion and skill that are nowadays required is vast and made up os set of elements that interconnect. Think how manufacturing requires basic concept or programming to face the new fabrication paradigm in the era of cnc and 3d printing as something that can be afforded by even consumer users. Learning is now more similar to graph navigation than the classic linear flow of concepts and objectives that book based training offers. The problem is that navigation paths and ergonomics are no longer in the hands of the source of learning material. The success of a learning journey relies on the ability to attract, retain and influence the learner. Gamification is a clear tool that is able to no only help with user engagement but can influence both the user behaviours and the content creation process. In the session we want to talk about how much success is in the end the dynamics happening between the learner and the skill development process, how all of this is not only an education goal but a key value for the industry in general. Also we need to reflect on the subject from the lens of the pandemic events and disruptions. Traditional educational methodologies and support structure have show the cracks and new dimensions are coming up when it comes to skill acquisition and development.

Dr. Diego Colombo

Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft Corporation

I have been working in both research and industry focusing on the effect of dynamic code evolution in several fields. During my years at University of Pisa and IMT Lucca I have been working with industrial partners like Microsoft Research and Realtime Worlds to work on the themes of robotics, ai and video games. I then moved to the area of programming languages and software architecture applying my work in financial institutions before joining Microsoft in the area of interactive programming as tool for exploration and learning. I now work with the team of .NET Interactive to develop the core engine and architecture for polyglot programming that is used in few areas like data science and more general in notebooks. Still during my work in the industry I keep working with colleagues in research and higher education.

Keynote #2: Fulfilling the Promise and Potential of Gamification


Ever since Gartner’s identified gamification as an emergent technology in its Hype Cycle report in 2011, many bold predictions about this technology were made. Gamification took the industries by a whirlwind. Venture capitalists, startups, and large enterprises are all jumping on this simple elegant framework that can drive individual behavior changes at a scale and speed that could change the world.

Today, more than 10 years later, none of the predictions were realized. Gamification is no longer on the Hype Cycle, and it’s subsumed into other disciplines, such as user experience, product design, and software development. Join me to explore what’s the missing key and how you can make a difference and fulfill the promise and potential of gamification.

Dr. Michael Wu

Chief AI Strategist

PROS

Dr. Michael Wu is one of the world’s premier authorities on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data science, and behavioral economics. He’s currently the Chief AI Strategist at PROS (NYSE: PRO), an AI-powered SaaS provider that helps companies monetize more efficiently in the digital economy. He’s been appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at the Ecole des Ponts Business School for his work in Data Science, and he serves as an advisor and a lecturer for UC Berkeley Extension’s AI programs.

Prior to PROS, Michael was the Chief Scientist at Lithium for a decade, where he focuses on developing predictive and prescriptive algorithms to extract insights from social media big data. His research spans many areas, including customer experience, CRM, online influence, gamification, digital transformation, AI, etc. His R&D won him the recognition as an Influential Leader by CRM Magazine along with Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff and other industry giants.

Michael has served as a DOE fellow at the Los Alamos National Lab conducting research in face recognition and was awarded 4 years of full fellowship under the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Prior to industry, Michael received his triple major undergraduate degree in Applied Math, Physics, and Molecular & Cell Biology; and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s Biophysics program, where he uses machine learning to model visual processing within the human brain. Michael believes in knowledge dissemination, and speaks internationally at universities, conferences, and enterprises. His insights have inspired many global enterprises and are made accessible through “The Science of Social,” and “The Science of Social 2”—two easy-reading e-books.

PANEL DISCUSSION

Top five lessons learned in entertainment games, serious games, and gamification R&D....

is there a ray of sunshine?

Prof. Jeremy Bradbury


Short Bio

Jeremy Bradbury is an Associate Professor at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. He is the leader of Ontario Tech's Software Engineering & Education Research (SEER) Lab and is a principal investigator in the Human-Centred Computing Lab. Prof. Bradbury’s research focus on utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve software education as well as software testing and analysis. His research lab develops open-source serious games for learning programming and software development practices.

Prof. Matthew Guzdial

  • University of Alberta Department of Computing Science/Amii, Canada








Short Bio


Matthew Guzdial is an Assistant Professor in the department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning, creativity, and human-computer interaction, primarily in the domain of games. This includes investigating automated game generation, human-AI game design collaboration, and user modeling. He is a recipient of an Early Career Researcher Award from NSERC, and two best paper awards from the International Conference on Computational Creativity..

Prof. Adam Smith



Short Bio

Adam is an Assistant Professor of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz where he directs the Design Reasoning Lab. As an academic and a consultant, he has worked on games for mathematics education, and as a hobbyist programmer he has built generative art and music toys reaching a broad international audience. His current research examines high-assurance methods for procedural content generation, exploration-based machine playtesting methods, and extending information retrieval (search engines) to the domain of interactive media like apps and games.

Prof. Alf Inge Wang


Short Bio


Alf Inge Wang is a professor in game technology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on using game technology for good, and he has published over 130 international peer-review publications as well as won several awards including Norwegian Tech Award 2014. Wang is also inventor of the global game-based learning platform Kahoot!, co-founder of the exergame platform PlayPulse, and inventor and co-founder of BitPet – a location-aware AR game to increase physical and social activity.

Theme and Goals

Games are a popular form of entertainment and, due to their nature (i.e., interactive, immersive, etc.), strongly lend themselves for use beyond this original intent. Serious games, or games with a purpose, have been introduced to integrate the entertainment value games with domain specific objectives on important topics within education, health, and the environment to mention a few. In addition, gamification has been used to enhance non-entertainment applications with game elements; it aspires to foster behavioral changes, engagement, motivation, and participation in activities. In this context, the actions performed have meaning/value in the game experience in order to improve workplace performance or learn something in real life. The growing adoption of gameful experiences in all of the previous contexts make their design and development increasingly complex due to, for example, the number and variety of users, and their potential mission criticality. This complexity is nurtured, among the other factors, by a lack of theoretical grounding and adequate frameworks to engineer the intended solutions.

GAS 2022 seeks to bring the attention of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to the opportunities and challenges involved in new trends and issues related to the development of entertainment games, serious games, and gamified applications. It provides a forum to explore issues that crosscut the software engineering and the games development communities.

The goals of GAS 2022 are to:

  1. Bring together the greater communities of Software Engineering and Game Engineering in an interactive program that encourages discussion and scholarly debate from interdisciplinary perspective.

  2. Identify and explore emerging opportunities, research challenges, costs, and benefits for entertainment games, serious games, and the gamification of traditional (non-games) applications and activities.

  3. Identify and explore emerging research challenges, trends, costs, and benefits on enabling socio-economic change through games or game-based applications, with SE techniques.

  4. Generate a new research agenda, identify topics of interest for this community, and how future workshops and social media groups may explore these topics.

Theme and Goals

Games are a popular form of entertainment and, due to their nature (i.e., interactive, immersive, etc.), strongly lend themselves for use beyond this original intent. Serious games, or games with a purpose, have been introduced to integrate the entertainment value games with domain specific objectives on important topics within education, health, and the environment to mention a few. In addition, gamification has been used to enhance non-entertainment applications with game elements; it aspires to foster behavioral changes, engagement, motivation, and participation in activities. In this context, the actions performed have meaning/value in the game experience in order to improve workplace performance or learn something in real life. The growing adoption of gameful experiences in all of the previous contexts make their design and development increasingly complex due to, for example, the number and variety of users, and their potential mission criticality. This complexity is nurtured, among the other factors, by a lack of theoretical grounding and adequate frameworks to engineer the intended solutions.

GAS 2022 seeks to bring the attention of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to the opportunities and challenges involved in new trends and issues related to the development of entertainment games, serious games, and gamified applications. It provides a forum to explore issues that crosscut the software engineering and the games development communities.

The goals of GAS 2022 are to:

  1. Bring together the greater communities of Software Engineering and Game Engineering in an interactive program that encourages discussion and scholarly debate from interdisciplinary perspective.

  2. Identify and explore emerging opportunities, research challenges, costs, and benefits for entertainment games, serious games, and the gamification of traditional (non-games) applications and activities.

  3. Identify and explore emerging research challenges, trends, costs, and benefits on enabling socio-economic change through games or game-based applications, with SE techniques.

  4. Generate a new research agenda, identify topics of interest for this community, and how future workshops and social media groups may explore these topics.

GAS 2022 welcomes submissions addressing topics at the intersection of software engineering and entertainment games, serious games, and gamification. Topics include, but are not limited to tailored, interdisciplinary approaches on:



  • engineering activities (requirements engineering, architecture, design, testing, playtesting).

  • umbrella activities (build management, configuration management, lifecycle processes (e.g., Agile, DevOps), traceability).

  • adaptatable game play.

  • biometrics in game development.

  • competitions (e.g., game jams).

  • data analytics (e.g., AI, machine learning) and visualisation.

  • domain specific languages and formal methods for games.

  • maintenance and evolution of games.

  • metrics for game development.

  • model based representations, analyses, and transformations.

  • monitoring, analysis, and visualization of game play data at scale.

  • procedural content generation.

  • re-use in games (e.g., franchises, modding, product lines).

  • software engineering education and training.

  • complexity of highly interdisciplinary teams (e.g., artists, computer scientist, engineering,)

  • tools, infrastructure, and services.


Submission Guidelines

We will accept three types of submissions:

  • Long Research Papers: max. 8 pages.

  • Short Research Papers: 4-6 pages.

  • Extended Abstracts (e.g., demo, position statement): 2 pages


Workshop papers must follow the ICSE 2022 Format and Submission Guidelines.


All submissions will be desk checked to ensure they meet the submission requirements (e.g., page limitations) and are within the scope of the workshop. A single blind review process will be used.


All workshop papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format through the EasyChair workshop website at https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=gas2022.


Accepted papers will become part of the workshop proceedings.

Important Dates


  • Submission deadline: 14 January, 2022 21 January, 2022

  • Notification of acceptance: 25 February 2022

  • Camera-ready version: 18 March 2022

  • Workshop day: 20 May 2022


Organizing Committee

icse.gas.workshop.2022@gmail.com

Antonio Bucchiarone

Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK)

Italy

Kendra M. L. Cooper

Independent Scholar

Canada

Dayi Lin

Centre for Software Excellence


Huawei Canada


Edward F. Melcer

University of California


Santa Cruz, USA

Kelvin Sung

University of Washington


Bothell, USA

Program Committee


  • Maximilian Altmeyer, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence

  • Jessica Bayliss, Rochester Institute of Technology

  • Fabiano Dalpiaz, Utrecht University

  • Juan De Lara, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

  • Henrik Engstrom, University of Skövde

  • Antonio Garcia-Dominguez, Department of Computer Science, Aston University

  • Patrick Jost, Norwegian University of Science and Technology - NTNU

  • Dominic Kao, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Bruce Maxim, University of Michigan

  • Dave Mongan, Xbox Game Studios Publishing

  • Jöran Pieper, University of Applied Sciences Stralsund

  • Massimo Tisi, IMT Atlantique, LS2N, France

  • Jim Whitehead, Dept. of Computational Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

  • Enes Yigitbas, Paderborn University

  • Vadim Zaytsev, Universiteit Twente