FUTUREPD 2016 - THE FUTURE OF PERSONAL DATA: ENVISIONING NEW PERSONALIZED SERVICES ENABLED BY QUANTIFIED SELF TECHNOLOGIES

Quantified Self (QS), which is also known as Personal Informatics (PI), aims to use technology to collect personal data on different aspects of people’s daily lives. QS tools are more and more allowing people to self-track a variety of information related to their behaviors (sleep, food), activities (walking, run), psychological states (mood, stress), physiological parameters (heart rate, blood sugar level), etc. As the current availability on the market of wearables and mobile applications for self-tracking is making it plausible that QS technologies will become pervasive in the near future, we have to start to explore how to employ personal data effectively for a broad user base.
In this workshop we want to investigate the opportunities offered by this renewed availability of personal data for improving the personalization of services and applications in different domains: for example for behavior change purposes by modifying unhealthy habits with targeted interventions; or for helping people remember their past, by enriching the retrieval process of personal memories with contextual information, transparently collected and presented in a personalized way; or for improving their learning processes, where personal data provide a potentially motivating context for e.g. mathematics and personal development and health studies.
In this workshop we want to explore a variety of challenges and explore different opportunities:
i) how can we model users’ habits and everyday activities through user modeling techniques based on “real-world” user’s data (related to e.g. user’s cognition, behavior, habits, physiology)?
ii) how can we convey new forms of recommendations and personalized feedback, goals, plans based on these data?
iii) which kind of personalized services and applications can be improved by this renewed availability of personal data in different domains, for example for behavior change purposes, for helping people remember their past, or for improving their learning processes?
iv) how can we define new personalized ways to present the data collected, in order to make them simple to understand and improve the meaningfulness of the interfaces and visualizations provided?
v) how can we face ethical and theoretical issues, e.g. to the user’s privacy and the possibility of storing all her experiences?
To summarize, we want to provide a multidisciplinary space to envision how the availability of “real-world” personal data (related to e.g. user’s cognition, behavior, habits, physiology) could in the future enable new complex forms of personalization and user modeling and how these could improve people’s life in different domains. We also want to investigate. While exploring the design space of these personalized services we want also to investigate what kind of theoretical and ethical issues they may arise.
Relevant workshop topics
They include but are not limited to:
i) New techniques for collecting data and engaging people in tracking them;
ii) Reflections on how “real-world” personal data could enable new complex forms of personalization;
iii) New ways to model users on the basis of real-world data;
iv) Wearables’ data for personalization and user modeling;
v) New services and applications for making personal data actionable, in order e.g. to trigger behavior change processes, enrich the recollection of memories, and support processes of learning;
vi) New personalized interaction modalities and visualizations to manipulate personal information;
vii) New techniques for interconnect, analyze and model personal data
viii) Theoretical reflections and thought-provoking insights about the future of personalization and modeling of human real-life behavior and how they could change our lives;
ix) Ethical issues related to the future pervasiveness of QS technologies.