*** Extended abstract submission deadline: December 1, 2012
 *** Paper submission deadline (for accepted abstracts): April 15, 2013

SCOPE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE:

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 user¹s 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 at 
http://www.umuai.org/paper_submission.html