Abstract:
Observation and analysis of a phenomenon at unprecedented levels of granularity not only furthers our understanding of it, but also transforms the way it is studied. For instance, invention of gene-sequencing and computational analysis transformed the life sciences, creating fields of inquiry such as genomics, proteomics, etc.; and the Hubble space telescope has furthered the ability of humanity to look much farther beyond what we could otherwise.

With the mass adoption of the Internet in our daily lives, and the ability to capture high resolution data on its use, we are at the threshold of a fundamental shift not only in our understanding of the social and behavioral sciences, but also the ways in which we study them. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and Virtual Worlds (VWs) have become increasingly popular and have communities comprising tens of millions. They serve as unprecedented tools to theorize and empirically model the social and behavioral dynamics of individuals, groups, and networks within large communities. This talk introduces the Virtual World  Exploratorium, a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary project which uses data from commercial MMOGs and VWs to study many fields of social science, including sociology, social psychology, organization theory, group dynamics, macro-economics, etc. We will summarize finding from many of these disciplines.

Given the amount of data being generated (e.g. all of Zynga's games on Facebook generate around 3 terabytes of data a day), there are exciting new challenges for the computer science community, especially in the areas of data management, data mining, and algorithms. We also present some findings in these areas.

This research is financially supported by the NSF, the Army Research Institute, the IARPA, and by the ARL through a Network Science CTA award. Sony Online Entertainment and Linden Labs have provided the dataset for this research.


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