New platforms for social computation and web-gaming

In the last few years the barriers between humans and computers are becoming thinner and those between the physical and digital domains are also rapidly dissolving. The ever increasing penetration of mobile and pervasive technology with broadband Internet connectivity has radically changed our society and created a new collaboration and communication paradigm by revealing an unprecedented level of spatial, temporal, behavioural and contextual information about our citizens. The revolutionary character of the ability to mine traces of real-world interactions has deep implications for social and computational sciences. At the same time the Web has been progressively acquiring the status of an infrastructure for "social computing" that allows to coordinate the cognitive abilities of human agents in online communities, and steer the collective user activity towards predefined goals. This general trend is also triggering the adoption of web-games as a very interesting laboratory to run experiments in the social-sciences and whenever the contribution of human beings is crucially required for research purposes. In this talk I'll discuss recent advances in this area I'll present a few examples of ICT-mediated research areas and I'll introduce Experimental Tribe (ET), a novel general purpose web-based platform for social computation.