Submission Deadline: 15 June 2015
Notification of Acceptance: 1 July 2015
Camera-ready: 10 July 2015
Workshop Day: 7 September 2015

The workshop proceedings are available at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2800835&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=554729615&CFTOKEN=23333776

Introduction

Quantified Self (QS), also known as Personal Informatics (PI), is a school of thought that aims to use technology for acquiring and collecting personal data on different aspects of the daily lives of people. These data can be internal states (e.g. mood or glucose level in the blood), or indicators of performance (e.g. the kilometers run), or behaviors and work habits (e.g. sleep or level of distraction).

The purpose of collecting these data is the gaining of self-awareness and self-knowledge or some kind of change or improvement (behavioral, psychological, etc.).

In spite of the fast growth in the market of these kinds of tools, many issues arise when we consider their usage in the daily lives of common people, such as: i) Motivation in tracking data and accuracy of the data tracked; ii) Capability of managing and integrating different kinds of personal data; iii) Understandability of the gathered data; iv) Meaningfulness of the visualizations provided and the ability to make data actionable; v) Motivations for long-term usage.

In this workshop, we want to tackle some of these issues, going beyond the Quantified Self to explore both new technologies and design techniques that could be applied to this field. We aim to find new ways for tracking, managing, interpreting and visualizing personal data, imagining how the Quantified Self technologies will evolve in the next years and what we could do to make them closer to the users’ needs and desires.

To this aim, we are looking for:

  • New modalities for engaging users in self-reporting their data through new approaches such as tangible interfaces, gamification, smart objects, etc.
  • New solutions for integrating heterogeneous kinds of personal data to provide users with a more comprehensive picture of their “selves”: through e.g. machine learning techniques, mash-up systems, etc.
  • New tools for simplifying the management and interpretation of the gathered data to provide thought provoking insights on users’ current behaviors and useful suggestions for improving their habits: through e.g. user modeling techniques, data mining, etc.
  • New meaningful visualizations of human behavior data to turn data into affordances for action by taking inspiration e.g. from the entertainment world (narratives, video games, etc.), social data visualization, or leveraging new interactions techniques, such as natural interfaces.

Topics of interest

We welcome researchers from diverse disciplines, such as UX designers, HCI experts, developers, data mining and data visualization experts, social scientists and psychologists, inviting them to submit manuscripts related to every aspects that could promote reflections and advancements in Quantified Self/Personal Informatics field.

Relevant workshop topics include but are not limited to:

  • New technologies for self-monitoring (e.g. new wearable devices or ubiquitous systems) and activity recognition
  • New design techniques for engaging people in tracking their data
  • Suggestions for interacting in new ways with Smart Objects embedded with data gathering functions (Internet of Things).
  • Personalization and (lifelong) user modeling techniques
  • Interoperability, semantic web and machine learning techniques
  • Techniques for protecting personal data and make users perceive a greater control on them
  • New forms of data visualization and new interaction techniques for manipulating personal information
  • Methodologies for evaluating the subjective experience of QS applications
  • Use cases that investigate the effectiveness of novel solutions for QS
  • Suggestions for fostering the long-term usage of QS applications

Workshop Format
The one-day workshop will be divided in a presentation phase in which participants will briefly present their works and a design phase in which they will have to imagine, through small-group work, new solutions for getting closer the Quantified Self systems to user needs. To this aim, we will use a format aimed at quickly generating many ideas and solutions to a problem through sketching, exposition and critique.

Paper submissions
We will accept both position papers and research papers, case studies, future research challenges and reflections, two-to-six pages long, suggesting new ways for exploiting the plethora of personal data becoming increasingly available by ubicomp and wearable technologies. Papers will be reviewed by the program committee based on their pertinence with the workshop topics, quality of the exposition and, mainly, potential to trigger discussions and insights for inspiring the design of new solutions during the workshop.

All the accepted manuscripts will be included in the ACM Digital Library and supplemental proceedings of the main conference.
All workshop papers must be up to six pages long in the 2016 SIGCHI Extended Abstract format and submitted via easychair.

The deadline for submission is June 15, 2015.
Papers should be in pdf format and should not be anonymized.

During the workshop we will announce the winners of the “best paper award” and “best presentation (audience) award”.

After the workshop, we also plan to organize a special issue with the most relevant contributions in an International Journal (e.g. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction).

Program Committee
Jon Froehlich, University of Maryland
Martijn de Groot, The Quantified Self Institute, Hanze University of Applied Science, Groningen
Hyoseok Yoon, Korea Electronics Technology Institute
Daniel Epstein, University of Washington, Seattle
Ian Li, Google, US
Rosa Arriaga, Georgia Institute of Technology
Seiichi Uchida, Kyushu University
Eun Kyoung Choe, Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology
Tsutomu Terada, Kobe University, Japan
Sean Munson, College of Engineering, University of Washington
Alessandro Marcengo, Telecom Italia
Edison Thomaz, School of Interactive Computing Georgia Institute of Technology
Assunta Matassa, University of Torino
Dirk Trossen, InterDigital Europe, UK
Rami Albatal, Dublin City University
Dana Pavel, TecVis, UK
Na Li, Dublin City University
Jochen Meyer, OFFIS, Germany
Sara Riggare, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm
Katarzyna Wac, University of Copenhagen
Antonio Kruger, DFKI, Germany
Michael Schmitz, DFKI, Germany
Vania Dimitrova, University of Leeds
Geert-Jan Houben, University of Delft

Organizers and Program co-chairs
Amon Rapp, University of Torino (amon.rapp@gmail.com)
Federica Cena, University of Torino
Judy Kay, University of Sydney
Bob Kummerfeld, University of Sydney
Frank Hopfgartner, University of Glasgow
Till Plumbaum, Technische Universität Berlin
Jakob Eg Larsen, Technical University of Denmark

For any questions, write to: amon.rapp@gmail.com