Modeling and Analyzing Engagement in Social Network Challenges

Within a completely new line of research, we are exploring the power of modeling for human behaviour analysis, especially within social networks and/or in occasion of large scale live events. Participation to challenges within social networks is a very effective instrument for promoting a brand or event and therefore it is regarded as an excellent marketing tool.
Our first reasearch has been published in November 2016 at WISE Conference, covering the analysis of user engagement within social network challenges.
In this paper, we take the challenge organizer’s perspective, and we study how to raise the
engagement of players in challenges where the players are stimulated to
create and evaluate content, thereby indirectly raising the awareness about the brand or event itself. Slides are available on slideshare:

We illustrate a comprehensive model of the actions and strategies that can be exploited for progressively boosting the social engagement during the challenge evolution. The model studies the organizer-driven management of interactions among players, and evaluates
the effectiveness of each action in light of several other factors (time, repetition, third party actions, interplay between different social networks, and so on).
We evaluate the model through a set of experiment upon a real case, the YourExpo2015 challenge. Overall, our experiments lasted 9 weeks and engaged around 800,000  users on two different social platforms; our quantitative analysis assesses the validity of the model.

The paper is published by Springer here.

cross-platform_pdf

 

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An Empirical Study on Simplification of Business Process Modeling Languages

Today I gave my presentation of our Empirical Study on Simplification of Business Process Modeling Languages at the Conference of Software Language Engineering, in Pittsburg, PA (co-located with Splash 2015).

You can find the full presentation here below, and some more details in this post by Eric Umuhoza on Jordi Cabot’s blog.

The work is based on the fact that the adaptation, specially by means of a simplification process, of modeling languages is a common practice due to the overwhelming complexity of most standard languages (like UML or BPMN), not needed for typical usage scenarios while at the same time companies don’t want to go to the extremes of defining a brand new domain specific language.

Unfortunately, there is a lack of examples of such simplification experiences that can be used as a reference for future projects. In this paper we report on a field study aimed at the simplification of a business process modeling language (namely, BPMN) for making it suitable to end users.

Our simplification process relies on a set of steps that encompass the selection of the language elements to simplify, generation of a set of language variants for them, measurement of effectiveness of the variants through user modeling sessions and extraction of quantitative and qualitative data for guiding the selection of the best language refinement, as shown here:

We describe the experimental setting, the output of the various steps of the analysis, and the results we obtained from users. Finally, we conclude with an outlook towards the generalization of the approach and consolidation of a language simplification method.
Out of this, you can also find an overview on how these results have been used by Fluxedo, a startup around a mobile app for social task planning.

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Introducing the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML)

Yesterday, I gave my first webinar on IFML.

As you may already know, IFML stands for Interaction Flow Modeling Language and is the new OMG standard designed for expressing the user interaction and control behaviour of the front-end of software applications. The Interaction Flow Modeling Language has been adopted as a standard by OMG in March 2013 and is now being disseminated to the public.

Here is the slidedeck used for the webinar, I think it provides a good overview on the new standard language. As usual, the slides are also available for download (through SlideShare).
Stay tuned for the recorded audio/video of the webinar, I will post it soon.

The full video recording of the webinar is now available on YouTube too. See it here:
 

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