Digital behaviour intervention is a growing area of research which
investigates how interactive systems can encourage and
support people to change their behaviour. Personalization plays an
important role in this, as the most effective persuasive and
motivational strategies are likely to depend on user characteristics
such as the user's personality, affective state, existing
attitudes, behaviours, knowledge, and goals. Example application
areas include health care (e.g., encouraging people to eat more
healthily and exercise more), education (e.g., motivating learners
to study more), environment (e.g., encouraging people to use less
energy and more public transport), and collaborative content
development (e.g., incentivising people to annotate resources).
Recently, three research areas separately and from different
perspectives have started to focus on personalization and
behavior change, by developing complex cognitive models of rational
and extra-rational features, involving emotions, persuasion,
motivation and argumentation. The first, stemming from a seminal
work by B.J. Fogg (2006), is now widely known as Persuasive
Technology. Persuasive Technology focuses on interactive technology
that can motivate and influence the user. The second research field
is Affective Computing. Originating from the seminal work by R.
Picard (1997), Affective Computing is interested in the
use, understanding and modelling of emotions and affect in computer
systems. Finally, Argument and Computation (Simari, Reed, Rahwan
& Grasso, 2011) has also emerged in the past decade as a
research strand interested in computational models and theories
of argumentation and persuasion coming from Philosophy and
Artificial Intelligence.
This special issue focuses on how adaptive and personalised systems
can motivate people, for instance to improve health, or to
use sustainable resources, or to achieve goals or specific skills,
by using persuasion and argumentation techniques and/or
techniques involving the affective and emotional sphere.
The topics of interest for the special issue include (but are not
limited to):
* User models for persuasive and motivational systems (e.g.,
modeling user engagement, personality and affective states,
integrating affective and non-affective aspects)
* Tailored argumentation in persuasive and motivational systems
(e.g., persuasive discourse processing; rhetoric and
affect; computational models of argumentation tailored to a specific
user)
* Theoretical frameworks of personalized persuasive and motivational
systems (e.g., relationships between individual differences
and persuasive strategies)
* Evaluated applications of personalized behaviour change and
motivational strategies(e.g., in intelligent tutoring,
health promotion, sustainable transport, sustainable energy,
collaborative content development)
* Ethical issues of personalized digital behaviour interventions
* User-centred design and evaluation methodologies of personalized
digital behaviour interventions
PAPER SUBMISSION & REVIEW PROCESS
Prospective authors must first submit an extended abstract (no more
than 4 single-spaced pages, formatted with 12pt font and 1
inch margins) via EasyChair (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=umuaipbc2013)
to the special issue editors.
All submitted abstracts will receive an initial screening by the
special issue editors. Abstracts that do not pass this
initial screening (i.e., the abstracts that are deemed not to have a
reasonable chance of acceptance) will not be considered further.
The authors of abstracts that pass the initial screening will be
invited to submit the full version of the paper.
Formatting guidelines and submission instructions for full papers
can be found athttp://www.umuai.org/paper_submission.html<http://www.umuai.org/paper_submission.html>.
UMUAI is an archival journal that publishes mature and substantial
research results on the (dynamic) adaptation of computer systems to
their human users, and the role that a model of the system about the
user plays in this context. Many articles in UMUAI are quite
comprehensive and describe the results of several years of work.
Consequently, UMUAI gives "unlimited" space to authors (as long as
what they write is important). Authors whose paper exceeds 40 pages
in journal format (including illustrations and references) are
however requested to supply a short justification upon submission
that explains why a briefer discussion of their research results
would not be advisable.
IMPORTANT DATES:
- Submission of Title and Abstract: Dec 1st, 2012
- Notification of suitability of abstract: Dec 22nd, 2012
- Full Paper Submission: April 15th, 2013
- First round of review notifications: July 15th, 2013
- Revisions of papers due: October 15th, 2013
- Final notifications due: January 15th, 2014
- Final papers due: February 15th, 2014
- Publication of special issue: April 15th, 2014