From the perspective of game system designers, players' behavior is one of the most important factors they must consider when designing game systems. To gain a fundamental understanding of the game play behavior of online gamers, exploring users' game play time provides a good starting point. This is because the concept of game play time is applicable to all genres of games and it enables us to model the system workload as well as the impact of system and network QoS on users' behavior. It can even help us predict players' loyalty to specific games. In this paper, we present the World of Warcraft Avatar History (WoWAH) dataset, which comprises the records of 91,065 avatars. The data includes the avatars' game play times and a number of attributes, such as their race, profession, current level, and in-game locations, during a 1,107-day period between Jan. 2006 and Jan. 2009. We believe the WOWAH dataset could be used for various creative purposes, now that it is a public asset of the research community. It is available for free download at http://mmnet.iis.sinica.edu.tw/dl/wowah/.

Recently, many research groups have dedicated their efforts to the development of Weblog (or Blog) tools to facilitate cooperative learning. However, these tools were mainly for young students in regular courses at schools. For adult learners, especially elderly people, lifelong learning is also important in their everyday life. Therefore, it is valuable to study the possible development of these tools for such a user group in the future. The objective of this research is to study the effects of knowledge sources and learning styles of the elders on their motivations to use Weblog tools for lifelong learning. Field studies and questionnaire surveys were conducted to elicit their requirements. The results showed that both knowledge sources and learning styles had significant effects on the willingness to use Blogs as the platform to exchange their knowledge and experience.

Recent trend in the development of mobile devices, wireless communications, sensor technologies, weblogs, and peer-to-peer communications have prompted a new design opportunity for enhancing social interactions. This paper introduces our preliminary experiences in designing a prototype utilizing the aforementioned technologies to share life experience. Users equipped with camera phones coupled with short-range communication technology, such as RFID, can capture life experience and share it as weblogs to other people. However, in reality, this is easier said than done. The success of weblogs relies on the active participation and willingness of people to contribute. To encourage active participations, a ranking system, AgreeRank, is specifically developed to get them motivated.

The proliferation of brand slogans via advertising channels is blurring the distinction between brains and brands. Brand slogans are designed to have positive effects on their brands. However, it is a non-trivial task to examine how brand slogans affect their customers' emotions and how emotions influence perceptions of brand images. In this paper we demonstrate the slogan validator, a novel and language-independent application that can be utilized to evaluate brand slogans by analyzing speech signals from customers' voice of slogans. The intention was to provide a means of exploring whether or not some of the claimed effects for existing brand slogans could actually be realized by the emotion recognition in speech technique rather than the traditional questionnaire responses. The preliminary results of the experiment show that the slogan validator yields high consistency with the participants' actual perceptions of the brand slogans chosen for this research. Moreover, the variation among participants' preferences of these brands can be identified

Recent development and proliferation of mobile devices, wireless communication, and sensor technologies have prompted a new vision of social interactions in the world in which we inhabit. For example, the number of mobile phones that are capable of capturing users' spontaneous life experiences not only in pictures but also in audio and video clips is on the increase. In addition, captured experiences can be sent and shared with others over wireless networks such as WiFi, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, or recently commenced third-generation (3G) protocols. Other technology trends such as weblog and peer-to-peer communication provide a ubiquitous platform and a model of motivating users to share life experiences with other people. The hypothesis is that everyone can be an owner of a weblog which records their experience about place, people, and things that interest them. Initial form of peer-to-peer communication, centralized directory service, can help authors of weblogs attain widespread of popularity and increase the level of participation in this type of interaction. The convergence of these technologies provides new design opportunities for computer-mediated communications. The aim of this paper is to share our experiences in designing and implementing a novel physical prototype which incorporates peer-to-peer communication, weblog, RFID, wireless networking, and mobile phone technologies to enhance social quality of shared life experience.