MSc Semester Project

Title

A social game “Epitome”

Candidate

Keishi Nishida

Supervisor

Prof. Dr. Touradj Ebrahimi

Assistant: Ivan Ivanov

Expected

June 10, 2011

Place

EPFL

Description

People like sharing their photos with friends, family and colleagues in order to tell stories of important events in their lives. Since number of photos taken in our daily lives increases every day, it is time-consuming to look at all shared photos. Summarization is an effective way to help getting a quick overview of a set of photos. An approach has been proposed for photo album summarization through a novel social game “Epitome” as a Facebook application.
“Epitome” game concentrates on small tasks: selection of the most representative photo of a reduced set of images (game “Select the Best!”) and partitioning of the reduced set into two distinct parts (game “Split it!”). This semester project aims at improving the user interface of the game in order to publish it online, then collecting research data and analyzing them. The following tasks should be performed:

• Study different online games in which people collectively solve computational problems and participate in collecting research data (games with a purpose),
• Improve the user interface of the “Epitome” game and make sure that it runs correctly in the most popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari),
• Implement algorithms which use reduced number of images in both “Select the Best!” and “Split it!” games,
• Collect research data by sharing the link of the game on Facebook and asking people to play it,
• Validate the concept of this game by making use of a questionnaire on several subjects who played it,
• Evaluate and analyze the collected data.