RecSys 2012 Workshop
Recommender Technologies for Lifestyle Change

In conjunction with the 6th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys'12)
September 13, 2012, Dublin, Ireland
http://pc57724.uni-regensburg.de/lifestyleChange/

CALL FOR PAPERS


DESCRIPTION

In today's society, particularly in the affluent society, lifestyle is influenced by technology and
the abundance of financial resources. Moreover, many believe that nowadays medical knowledge can be
immediately applicable in case of illness, and cure illnesses also caused by bad habits, as technical
knowledge can be used for repairing a broken car.

This results in lifestyles that do not care about the negative long-terms effects on each individual
person, but also on the environment. The most prominent example of this is represented by various
types of chronic illnesses in developed countries that result from poor lifestyle choices (e.g.
diabetes or heart diseases).

In this context, the aim of this workshop is to explore possibilities for recommender systems to
support users in taking useful decisions related to various aspects of their lifestyle; we call them
Lifestyle Change Recommender Systems (LSCRS).

There are three main challenges for LSCRSs: firstly, such systems have to assess the user's context
for delivering such recommendations. Secondly, in order to promote any change in the lifestyle of
the user, they have to recommend a tailored sequence of items, mostly actions, taking into account
the dependencies between items and the effects of each item recommendation. Thirdly, the systems have
to be defined in a way that favors the user's continuous attention, and allows to explain the reasons
for the change in the user's future behavior, and to communicate the changes already effectuated.

Hence, in order to provide an effective support to lifestyle change, recommender systems need to provide
communicative capabilities, e.g, with multi-modal dialogue systems. Recommender technologies must initiate
a feedback-change-loop that could contribute to lowering the risks of severe illnesses for many individual
users and to improving the overall environmental situation.


TOPICS

In the light of these challenges, submissions are solicited that address the following topics:

- Surveys of lifestyle related activities and technological approaches to monitoring them
- Context modeling for activity recommendations
- Formal models of sensor data for monitoring every day activities
- User models for every day life recommendations that provide user-tailored content
- Motivational models for lifestyle, every day activities, and environmental responsibility
- Recommendations of sequences of items (e.g. physical exercises for a whole week, planning meals for a month)
- Measures of the effectiveness for lifestyle change recommender systems
- Approaches to combine sensor data and interactive user input in LSCRSs
- Strategies to cement behavioral change
- Strategies for situation- and user-aware presentation of recommendations
- Persuasive technologies for interaction with and/or among users on their personal situation,
their habits, and their options to change their lifestyle
- Recommendation of activities for leisure time and lifestyle
- Recommendation of information sources (e.g. forum entries, blogs) for LSCRSs


IMPORTANT DATES

Jun 8, 2012: Workshop paper submission deadline
Jun 22, 2012: Author notification
Jul 3-6, 2012: Camera-ready workshop papers due
Sept 13, 2012: Workshop date


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Submit either a full paper of no more than 6 pages, or a short paper (at most 4 pages). Short papers
may address an important problem for further research or describe a practical problem or an interesting
lesson learned. In addition, we solicit proposals for short demonstrations (at most 4 pages, and
software demonstrations taking at most 15 minutes), emphasizing the original contribution, functionality
or conceptual foundation of the system.

All submissions will be handled electronically in PDF format. The submissions should follow the
RecSys 2012 style guide (paper templates are provided in Microsoft Word and LaTeX on the conference
website: http://recsys.acm.org/2011/submission.shtml). Papers should be submitted via EasyChair submission
system (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lifestyle12). If you have used EasyChair before, you
may use your existing username and password. Otherwise please create a new EasyChair account.

Each submission is blind reviewed by three members of the program committee. Refereeing criteria are
relevance to workshop topics, significance and novelty of the research, technical content, discussion on
relation to previous work and clarity of presentation.

At least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the workshop to present the paper.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Christoph Bartneck University of Canterbury (New Zealand)
Shlomo Berkovsky NICTA (Sydney, Australia)
Pablo Castells Univ. Madrid (Spain)
David Elsweiler Univ. Regensburg (Germany)
Cathal Gurrin Dublin City University (Ireland)
Morgan Harvey Univ. Erlangen (Germany)
Maurits Kaptein Philips Research (Netherlands)
Paul Resnick University of Michigan (USA)
Alan F. Smeaton Dublin City University (Ireland)
Ute Schmid Univ. Bamberg (Germany)
Katerzyna Wac University of Geneva (Switzerland)