Topics for any discipline that focuses on quantitative or technical data have always depended on the datasets that were available at the time. Crowdsourcing has changed that — democratizing the data-collection process and cutting researchers’ reliance on stagnant, overused datasets. Tools like Amazon Mechanical Turk allow anyone to gather data overnight, rather than waiting years.
Virtual worlds are a goldmine of untapped insights, even for predicting physical behaviors. Not only will we share PARC findings and methods developed to extract key data from online games, but more importantly, we'll discuss how social scientists converted and processed raw behavioral metrics into meaningful psychological variables that can be applied to a broad spectrum of business applications.