Challenges of Human Behavior Understanding for Inducing Behavioral Change

We summarize the contributions presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding (HBU’11) and the subsequent discussions. The scientific contributions focused on techniques and algorithmic aspects of human behavior analysis, including visual and audio modalities, as well as the design aspect of persuasive systems. One important conclusion of the workshop is that while persuasive systems and carefully designed persuasive messages form the crux of inducing behavior change, the design of systems informed by large-scale analysis of human behavior can also lead to engineered contexts for affecting behavior, at different resolutions ranging from an individual level (e.g. mobile platforms or smart homes) to urban level (e.g. carefully planned cities).