User Models for Motivational Systems:
The Affective and the Rational Routes to
Persuasion 	
  
	
  
2nd international workshop
In conjunction with UMAP 2011
11 July 2011, Girona, Spain

Preface
Recent years have witnessed the growth of three parallel strands of research, all
directing towards a more complex cognitive model of rational and extra-rational
features, involving emotions, persuasion, motivation and argumentation.
On one side, Persuasive Technology is emerging as a very strong research field,
interested in the use of interactive systems to influence human thought and behaviour.
The international Persuasive conference is now well established at its 6th edition, and
a series of other small events, like the Persuasive Technology Symposia (with AISB
in 2008 and 2009), and workshops about persuasive technology at AmI2009 and
Measuring Behavior 2010, confirm the importance of the field in the research
landscape.
Parallel to this, Affective Computing is interested in the use, understanding and
modelling of emotions and affect in computer systems. From the early 90s, which
also saw two UM workshops (at UM03 and UM05), Affective Computing is now an
established discipline, with an international conference (ACII), a professional society
(HUMAINE) and, recently, a new journal (IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing).
Finally, Argument and Computation is also emerged in the past decade as a research
strand interested in computational models of theories of argumentation and persuasion
coming from Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. Again, an increasing number of
events dedicated to the topic, including two annual workshop series (Argumentation
in MultiAgent Systems, now at its 8th edition, and Computational Models of Natural
Argument, at its 11th edition) and a biennial international conference (COMMA),
have recently been complemented by a new journal (Argument and Computation).

Following on from the workshop organised at UMAP 2010, this workshop intended to
sit at the intersection between these three areas of research, and focus 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 workshop’s call focused on strategies, techniques and evaluation for motivational
systems that tailor to cognitive and affective state of the individual. Suggested topics
were:




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    •   user models for persuasive motivational systems: Modeling receiver
        involvement, and position; Modeling personality and affective state for
        persuasion, Identifying relevant affective aspect in user modeling,
        Integrating affective and non-affective aspect in user models, Recognition
        and interpretation of the users’ communicative intentions and affective states
        and updating of the user model, Investigating the relationship between
        recognized affective states and their impact on users’ beliefs and motivation,
        Effect of cultural differences on persuasion;
    •   adaptive strategies for persuasion: Generating persuasive arguments;
        Ontologies for persuasion; Persuasive discourse processing: understanding
        what users say in terms of argumentation schemes; Computational models of
        argumentation tailored to a specific user; Rhetoric and affect: the role of
        emotions, personalities, etc. in models of persuasion and argumentation;
    •   motivation and affect: mutual interactions and synergies, peripheral routes of
        persuasion (humor, mood induction, enhancing source credibility)
    •   persuasive interfaces: ambient persuasion, use of embodied conversational
        agents, serious games
    •   applications and evaluations: in intelligent tutoring systems, health
        promotion, e-democracy, advertising, entertainment, coaching, decision
        support.
    •   ethical issues and evaluation of the impact of affective factors in motivation

We trust we managed to gather together an interesting set of papers on these topics,
and we look forward to an interesting and stimulating event.


                                                                     Floriana Grasso
                                                                           Jaap Ham
                                                                     Judith Masthoff




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                         Programme Committee


Elisabeth Andre, University of Augsburg, Germany
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University, UK
Timothy Bickmore, Northeastern University, US
Nadja de Carolis, University of Bari, Italy
Peter De Vries, University of Twente, Netherlands
Susan Ferebee, University of Phoenix, US
Nancy Green, University of North Carolina Greensboro, US
Marco Guerini, ITC-IRST, Povo-Trento, Italy
Helmut Horacek, University of the Saarland, Saarbr!cken, Germany
Irene Mazzotta, University of Bari, Italy
Cees Midden, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Hien Nguyen, University of Aberdeen, UK
Nicole Novielli, University of Bari, Italy
Fabio Paglieri, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
Helen Pain, University of Edinburgh, UK
Isabella Poggi, University Roma-Tre, Italy
Kaska Porayska-Pomsta, Institute of Education, University of London, UK
Chris Reed, University of Dundee, UK
Patrick Saint-Dizier, IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Oliviero Stock, ITC-IRST, Italy
Ielka van der Sluis, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Julita Vassileva, University of Saskatchewan, Canada




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