Title: Measuring intangibles: estimating social performances in sport, research, and software development

Abstract: This talk surveys some techniques for estimating performance, namely rating, in fields as diverse as sport, research, and software development.We focus on the Elo system, showing how it has been developed and successfully applied to estimating the performance of chess players. It is possibly the most widespread metrics applied to measure the progress of search algorithms and chess programs (even in comparison to human performance). It has been applied to other sports and games and even to communites of online players. It has been recently proposed as a way to rate researchers. Finally, we discuss its possible uses in social software engineering.

Short bio: Paolo Ciancarini is Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Informatics of the Univ. of Bologna, where he lectures on Software Engineering and Architecture. He has been Chair of the undergraduate school in Computer Science, and Chair of the Graduate School in Information and Communication Technologies at the University of Bologna. He has been involved in several projects funded by the European Commission. His current research interests include: knowledge engineering for social software, and entertainment computing.