Main goals of the workshop

Behavioural choices can make a significant difference in the energy consumption of households. New technology such as smart meters and energy usage displays can provide people with a better insight in their energy usage and usually lead to more sustainable behavioural choices. However, an important question is how ICT-technology can be used to influence energy consumption cognition and behavior. This workshop will focus on the question of how persuasive technology can be used for sustainable choices, both at a personal level and at a societal level.

The workshop sits at the intersection between human computer interaction, artificial intelligence, psychology and behavioural sciences and is meant for both researchers and people from industry. The first part of the workshop will consists of a number of presentations. The workshop will be concluded with a panel discussion on the main research issues, led by a moderator. The outcome of the workshop is a research agenda for behaviour change systems for sustainability. The aim is to write a journal paper about this agenda. All participants in the workshop are asked to provide a contribution, either in the form of a full paper for presentation or via a position papers.

Participation and Contributions

We solicit both full papers for presentation in the first part of the workshop (maximal 12 pages Springer LNCS format) and brief position papers (one page Springer LNCS format). In these one-page position paper participants are asked to explain their own perspective and describe at least two major research questions that need to be answered to bring the field a step further. Also the presenters of the full papers are asked to cover those questions in their contribution. Submissions can be done via the Easychair system.

Important dates

  • July 15: submission of full-paper contributionsli>
  • August 1: notification of acceptance
  • August 15: submission of position papers
  • August 29: Workshop in Amsterdam

The workshop will focus on strategies, techniques and evaluation for systems that promote sustainable behaviour change. Suggested topics are:

  • Technology: sensoring; recognition and interpretation of the users' behaviours and intentions; architecture and implementation; usage of smart meter infrastructure; data processing and analysis; managing inconsistent data.
  • User models for behaviour change support systems in the domain of sustainability: modeling motivations; modeling personality and affective state for persuasion; investigating the relationship between observer behaviour and users' beliefs and motivation, effect of social-cultural differences on persuasion.
  • Persuasive strategies: developing new persuasion mechanisms; forwarding theoretical development of persuasive technology; state-of-the-art influencing strategies from social cognition research, embodied cognition research; relationships between different types of persuasion and difference categories of behavior.
  • Personalization and adaptation: generating persuasive arguments tailored to a specific user; computational models of argumentation; adapting the rhetoric style to the users' personality; relating messages to personal characteristics and specific behaviour of the user.
  • Motivation and autonomy: what are requirements for people to be motivated to use such systems; how can credibility be enhanced; the importance of trust and confidence for allocating control to technological systems.
  • Gamification: competition elements for energy saving; playful peer comparison; reward systems.
  • Virtual agents: the use of conversational agents; embodied coaches.
  • Ethical issues: privacy; transparency; reliability, legal issues.
  • Applications and evaluations: descriptions of systems that implement behaviour change techniques in the context of sustainable behaviour; smart and persuasive thermostats; mobile apps to use sustainable resources, etc.

The workshop is open to both researchers and people from industry from all relevant fields. All participants in the workshop are asked to provide a contribution. We will solicit both full papers for presentation in the first part of the workshop and position papers. In the one-page position paper participants should explain their own perspective and describe at least two major research questions that need to be answered to bring the field a step further. Also the presenters of the full papers will be requested to list at least two questions of that kind.

Workshop Location

Amsterdam Business School

Plantage Muidergracht 12
1018 TV Amsterdam
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