Figure 1: System overview.The roughness of the road surface affects driving safety and comfort. Having complete and up to date information on the state of the road network is essential for maintenance planning, but it entails time consuming and costly monitoring activities. As a matter of fact, maintenance interventions are mainly based on the results of case by case inspections prompted by drivers' reports. Moreover, qualitative observations are seldom supported by objective measures, making it difficult for administrators to collect data providing a clear perception of the actual priorities.Recent studies have shown that it is possible to exploit the triaxial accelerometers with which smartphones are equipped to obtain a sound indicator of road surface roughness [1, 2]. A crowdsensing system, called SmartRoadSense [3], has been developed to allow any driver to contribute with his/her smartphone in monitoring the status of the roads he/she travels by car.As shown in Fig. 1, Smartroadsense is composed of: a mobile application, a cloud-based backend, and a web portal. The application runs in background on any car-mounted Android smartphone, reads the accelerometer data at a freFigure 2: Road roughness map.quency of 100Hz, and computes roughness values once per second. All the values are associated with GPS coordinates and opportunistically sent to the server as soon as a suitable data connection is available. Traces are processed in cloud to compensate GPS inaccuracy and to aggregate data provided by different users. OpenStreetMap is used for map matching and aggregation, performed every 6 hours. Aggregated roughness estimates are then made publicly available online and displayed in color-scale on interactive maps (Fig. 2).The demo shows the entire system at work, allowing the audience to directly install and test the app on their smartphones and to follow the processing steps by looking inside databases and software components. The main purpose of the demo is to highlight the distributed and collaborative nature of SmartRoadSense, which handles a large quantity of data in real time exploiting mobile terminals and cloudbased resources.Demo trailer at http://smartroadsense.it/demo/.
In this paper, we describe an online multi-player game that challenges players with abstract coding puzzles that are tied to a geographical location. The proposed system transposes the classical scheme of "treasure hunt" games into a mixed-reality game, where players must physically move in order to advance in the game, while at the same time interacting with a chatbot through an online messaging system. The implementation of the online game is described in detail and an overview of different deployments of the system is given, including a large-scale deployment during the European CodeWeek 2017. We discuss details of the proposed system, including lessons learned during the development and operation of the game. We also argue that mobile games like the one proposed can be successfully adopted for many different purposes, from entertainment to education.
Coding games, both computer-based and "unplugged" ones, have been increasingly used over the past years to promote code literacy and to bring basic programming concepts to the larger public, in particular to children in pre-school, elementary, and middle school ages.Chatbots on instant messaging (IM) platforms provide a modern and friction-free interface that allow software developers to instantly connect with a wide audience, making use of familiar conversational interface patterns."Code Hunting Games" is a chatbot-based multiplayer game, which engages multiple teams in a "treasure hunt" guided by a Telegram bot. On their track to the treasure, teams are challenged with a sequence of coding puzzles that must be solved using the conversational interface. At the same time, teams must move through physical space in order to reach geographical locations marked by a code, as indicated by the bot.In this paper we present the implementation of the game and describe several large-scale deployments, including one Europe-wide game session during Code Week 2017 with more than 160 competing teams. The system is freely available online for custom game sessions.We discuss the game's impact, in terms of engagement for children in particular, lessons learned during development and deployment, and future work.
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