IAM Creates Games for Good

Dave Gerding, associate professor in Columbia College Chicago’s Interactive Arts & Media department, is leading a team of researchers on a project aiming to gain value from the time people spend playing video games.

The team, which includes research assistant Maurice Rabb and game design major Roel Sanchez, has created Super Flick, a game designed for mobile phones or tablets where players sort images into categories by flicking them at the corresponding buckets. As the players sort the images, that action eventually teaches the computer to recognize each type on its own.

"We can provide a kind of artificial intelligence called machine learning and get the computers to start to recognize the patterns the same way that people do," said Gerding, in the ABC 7 story embedded below.




This type of research is also called gamification, and it teaches computers to recognize patterns and use them to solve problems.

"In play, there is knowledge that is imparted that we often overlook as being valuable," Maurice Raab said in the ABC 7 interview. "And the goal of games for good is capturing that energy towards greater purposes.We can gain from their collective intelligence this massive computing power of people working together toward this goal that they're even unaware that they're doing."

Super Flick should be available by the end of this summer, and will allow researchers to adapt the platform to fit their specific research needs.