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Awareness and Persuasion

In the last 10 years Europe has invested heavily in pursuing the research agenda of Ambient Intelligence. From the various possibilities that this technological vision opens up we are concerned specifically with applications that help improve social interactions between people and will help them change their behaviour and attitude.

In this talk I will focus on two concepts more specifically: First, on how Ambient Intelligence can help people develop and sustain awareness of each other’s whereabouts and activities in order to achieve benefits relating to feelings of connectedness, but also how to deal with related dangers that such technology can bring as, for example, regarding privacy issues. Second, this talk will focus on how Ambient Intelligence opens up new possibilities for influencing people’s attitudes and behaviors at a different scale and with more effectiveness than has been possible using traditional desktop and web environments. The concept of ambient persuasion is introduced, highlighting research results regarding the personalization of persuasive strategies.

The talk will go through a series of applications that have been designed, developed and tested in the field, to provide awareness between connected family members. We shall discuss design, engineering and scientific challenges, and will attempt to abstract away from the specific cases to propose a design framework for awareness and connectedness. The discussion on ambient persuasion will focus primarily on the experimental work that makes the case for personalized persuasive technology. Some first experiences with designing and evaluating such systems will be discussed as well and some of the related ethical issues will be discussed.