Personalized and Trusted Behaviour Change Technologies

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The proposed research will advance the state of the art in the area of computer systems supporting people to change their behaviour for their own benefit and for the benefit of the community. It will develop novel personalized persuasive technologies and incentive mechanisms that are trusted by users and that involve not just them, but their social circles (friends, neighbours, family members) in supporting them to achieve their behaviour change goals. I will explore effective motivational mechanisms empirically (through user studies and observations), theoretically (by designing trust and incentive mechanisms and evaluating them through theoretical analysis and simulations) and in practice (by designing and evaluating motivational mechanisms in real systems). I will use as a starting point selected theories of motivation and cognitive bias from social psychology to guide the design of persuasive strategies and incentive mechanisms that motivate users to engage in beneficial behaviours. The application areas include online shopping, self-improvement (learning), living a healthy lifestyle, practicing safe behaviours at work and leisure, and increasing the positive social connections of isolated (elderly or impaired) individuals.***While there has been active research in the area of designing software for persuasion and behaviour change over the last five years, there are three aspects in which the proposed research is novel:***1) Most existing approaches are still "one size fits all", providing at most offline tailoring of strategies to user types. The proposed research will develop personalized persuasive interventions, based on a new user modeling infrastructure that allows to aggregate diverse data from various sources, and for different purposes, considering how trustworthy the sources and the consumers of the information are. ***2) User trust in persuasive technologies has not been researched sufficiently, so there is no way to know if they are failing due to a lack of consideration of trust. The proposed research will explore if there is a correlation between user trust and the effectiveness of persuasive technologies and if considering other social factors, such as relationships and culture can influence both user trust and persuasive technology effectiveness. ***3) The proposed research will result in several behaviour change systems in important areas. They will share theoretical ideas and methodological approaches, but each will explore the problems of incorporating dynamic personalization, trust and mechanism design in the context of the particular domain and motivational purpose. Having multiple systems will provide a higher-level perspective on how the proposed frameworks, different methods and strategies generalize.**