Glen Berseth

I am an assistant professor at the University de Montreal and Mila. My research explores how to use deep learning and reinforcement learning to develop generalist robots.

Michael Brandon Haworth Articles


Gamification of Crowd-Driven Environment Design

Michael Brandon Haworth, Muhammad Usman, Davide Schaumann, Nilay Chakraborty, Glen Berseth, Petros Faloutsos, Mubbasir Kapadia

This paper describes using human creativity within a gamified collaborative design framework to address the complexity of predictive environment design. This framework is predicated on gamifying crowd objectives and presenting environment design problems as puzzles. A usability study reveals that the framework is considered usable for the task. Participants were asked to configure an environment puzzle to reduce an important crowd metric, the total egress time. The design task was constructed to be straightforward and uses a simplified environment as a probe for understanding the utility of gamification and the performance of collaboration. Single-player and multiplayer designs outperformed both optimization and expert-sourced designs of the same environment and multiplayer designs further outperformed the single-player designs. Single-player and multiplayer iterations followed linear and exponential decrease trends in total egress time respectively. Our experiments provide strong evidence towards an interesting novel approach of crowdsourcing collaborative environment design.