Brain Data Group

The CHI'24 Workshop on Future of Cognitive Personal Informatics

Sun 12th May 2024 - CHI'24 - Honolulu, HI, USA

While Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has contributed to demonstrating that physiological measures can be used to detect cognitive changes, engineering and machine learning will bring these to application in consumer wearable technology. For HCI, many open questions remain, such as: What happens when this becomes a cognitive form of personal informatics? What goals do we have for our daily cognitive activity? How should such a complex concept be conveyed to users to be useful in their everyday lives? How can we mitigate potential ethical concerns? This is different to designing BCI interactions; we are concerned with understanding how people will live with consumer neurotechnology. This workshop will directly address the future of Cognitive Personal Informatics (CPI), by bringing together design, BCI and physiological data, ethics, and personal informatics researchers to discuss and set the research agenda in this inevitable future.

The Aims of the Workshop

Disambiguate and consolidate the broad set of ideas coming from the community
Identify and unpack a series of Key Challenge Scenarios to help focus an agenda for the community
Explore the ethics and design space for these Key Challenge Scenarios
Strengthen the network between researchers and foster interdisciplinary collaboration in the community

Read the PDF

Call for Participation

This workshop explores the future of cognitive personal informatics. Looking beyond classifying cognitive states, the goal of this workshop is to examine why people will track their cognitive activity and how they will benefit from doing so. Especially in a world where wearable technology is beginning to estimate stress, and consumer neurotechnology is available at low cost.

We invite contributions aligned (but not limited) to the following topics:

Studies of how people manage their cognitive activity frequently and or longitudinally.
Research into how cognitive activity is conceptualised and understood by people.
Comparisons that differentiate between different types of cognitive activity.
Research into communities that could benefit from or be harmed by (mis)use of CPI.
Research into the designs that enable reflection on CPI.
Discussions of the ethical, legal, and regulatory aspects of CPI.

Note: We consider work on physiologically-driven interaction and cognitive state classification out of scope.

We invite 1) Research summaries (4-6 pages), 2) Position papers (e.g. essay, design fiction) (4-6 pages), or 3) Attendee abstracts (1 page) that describe your research perspective.

Submissions will be reviewed for how they will provoke discussion and contribute to understanding key use cases. All submissions should be in single-column ACM format. The main workshop will be in-person only, but with ways to get involved asynchronously. Research summaries and perspectives papers will be published via CEUR-WS, and authors will be asked to record a 5-minute video to be shared prior to the workshop.

Early Deadline for submissions: Feb 22, 2024 Feb 29, 2024
Notifications of acceptance: Mar 6, 2024
CHI Early Reg Deadline: Apr 1, 2024
Camera-ready: TBC

Want to submit late?

If you decided to go to CHI (or could get the budget to go) after the deadline, we are happy to get you involved in the workshop. You can still submit attendee abstracts up until the late deadline.

Late Deadline for submissions: Apr 22, 2024

Type: Attendee abstracts only

Notification of acceptance: asap afterwards

Submit Here

Related Research Areas

We believe the following communities are central to the future of consumer neurotechnology.

Physiological I/O and Psychology

Cognitive and neuroscience perspectives are critical for the discussion of personal cognitive informatics, because they ground what we understand happens in the brain, and what is practical or desirable to actually measure to make inferences.

Personal Informatics and Digital Health

The major change, as we move on from classifcation accuracy of various states, is to focus on personal informatics. A key challenge for the future of personal cognitive informatics is bringing in this expertise and prior knowledge at its early stages.

Neuroergonomics and The Future of Work

Managing a more cognitive future of work means better understanding of our daily mental workload and better strategies for managing stress. We consider the understanding of healthy lifestyles, and good work/life balance, to be a critical view on the future of personal cognitive informatics.

NeuroEthics and Trust

The neuroethics feld concerns the ethical, legal, and social challenges that emerge through developments in neuroscience. We believe its a critical development for this area, that HCI researchers interested in trust, law, and ethics get involved with neuroethics.

Join in!

Register for CHI in order to take part on the day! Join in the discussion early by joining our Slack Community.

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The Workshop Plan

The aim of the workshop is to set an agenda for the community, focusing on discussing the scenarios that will motivate ongoing and future work for our community. The aim is to work together for the majority of the session, and develop Key Challenge Scenarios as a product. We will also discuss contributions to an edited book that has been invited by Springer.

Accepted Submissions

See the proceedings on OSF (Being processed)

Submission Type	Title	Authors
Research Summary	Modeling User Preferences via Brain-Computer Interfacing	Luis A. Leiva (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg); V. Javier Traver (Universitat Jaume I, Spain); Aleksandra-Kawala Sterniuk (Opole University of Technology, Poland); Tuukka Ruotsalo (University of Copenhagen, Denmark and LUT University, Finland)
Research Summary	Team Cognitive Informatics: Leveraging Brain Sensing to Assess and Augment Team Performance in Creative Collaboration	Christopher Micek, Erin Solovey (Worcester Polytechnic Institute); Lourenço Rodrigues, Asmus Eilks, Lasse Warnke, Felix Putze (University of Bremen)
Position Paper	Research Perspective: Personalized Cognitive Recommendations using EEG for Enhanced Student Learning and Career Orientation	Van-Xuan Tran (Thu Dau Mot University, Binh Duong, Vietnam); Nhan Dang, An Mai, Chi Thanh Vi (International University, VNU-HCM, Vietnam)
Position Paper	Envisioning Secure and Private 6G-Enabled Cognitive Personal Informatics	Jan Hörnemann (Institute for Internet Security and AWARE7); Anna Triesch (AWARE7); Tobias Urban (Institute for Internet Security, Westphalian University of Applied Sciences); Matteo Große-Kampmann (Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences / AWARE7 GmbH)
Position Paper	Mental Workload vs Cognitive Load vs everything else in HCI	Max L. Wilson (University of Nottingham)
Position Paper	Discourses of Cognitive Augmentation and Their Values	Miguel Nacenta, Katherine Skipsey (University of Victoria)
Position Paper	Opportunities and challenges in harnessing consumer neurotechnology for general consumers in their everyday lives	Nhan Dang (International University, VNU-HCM); Van-Xuan Tran (Thu Dau Mot University); An Mai, Chi Vi (International University, VNU-HCM)
Position Paper	Confessions of a Cognitive Personal Informatics Skeptic	Daniel Epstein (UC Irvine)
Attendee Abstract	I'll Have a Chat with my Heart: Can Chatting with our Psychophysiological Data allow us to Align our Emotions with our Cognitive and Physiological States?	Talia Wise (Cornell University)
Attendee Abstract	Future of Work: Should we Design for Productivity or Happiness?	Sowmya Somanath, Regan L. Mandryk (University of Victoria)
Attendee Abstract	Shawn Gilles - Attendee Abstract	Shawn Gilles (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
Attendee Abstract	Attendee Abstract: Max V. Birk	Max Birk (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Attendee Abstract	Proactive Voice Intervention for Mental Health Management with Cognitive Personal Informatics	Chanhee Lee, Uichin Lee (KAIST)

Planned Workshop Structure

Session 1: Engaging Start

Session 1 will involve group forming and collaboratively establishing the premise of a range of Key Challenge Scenarios.

Session 2: Elaborating on Key Challenge Scenarios

We will focus developing a series of artefacts for these key challenge scenarios: personas, user stories, and scenarios.

Discussion Lunch

TBC: As people head of to lunch, we will ask them to discuss two key topics over lunch: a) interesting aspects of the elaborated key scenarios, b) aspects we may be missing, and c) initial ethical considerations that come to mind.

Session 3: Designing for Key Scenarios

The main aim of Q3 will then be to engage in design and prototyping activities, which specifically focus on imagining what CPI apps would look like that feed current, recent, and historic data for that user story and for the concerns of the associated personas.

Session 4: Future Research Plans

The afternoon session will focus on writing up the Key Challenge Senarios into shared google docs, as draft blog posts that will go on the CPI medium blog. We will also discuss proposed submissions to an edited book on the topic.

Workshop Dinner

Hybrid Options

Due to the location and timezone of the conference, and the working-group focus of the workshop plan, we do not plan to require/enable remote involvement 'on the day'.

We do welcome submissions from participants that cannot attend in person, where your paper and 5min video presentation (like all authors) will be available asynchronously around the workshop.

Organisers

Max L. Wilson

is an associate professor in the MRL at Nottingham, focused on evaluating the mental workload involved in completing work tasks and created by diferences in user interfaces, using fNIRS. Max has also worked on brain-controlled movies that have toured around the world, using consumer brain devices. Max is also a member of the IEEE Brain NeuroEthics Committee.

Christina Schneegass

is an assistant professor for Cognition & Design at Delft University of Technology. She has evaluated EEG as a method to assess language comprehension in learning systems. Her research aims to incorporate users' cognitive processes into the design and evaluation of technology to develop systems that empower users in their increasingly complex relationship with novel technologies.

Jwan Shaban

is a PhD student in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, and the thesis of her PhD directly aligns agenda of the Cognitive Personal Informatics workshop series. Jwan is interested in design methods for reflecting on this new form of personal data.

Horia Maior

is an assistant professor in HCI with the School of Computer Science and the Horizon Digital Economy Institute at the University of Nottingham, with a focus on Mental Workload as Personal data, and the wider use of brain and physiological data in trustworthy autonomous systems, manufacturing, and other industry environments.

Anna Cox

is a professor of HCI in UCL Interaction Centre, in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences. Anna’s research focuses on understanding the relationships between the design of information and communications technologies (ICTs) and behavioural outcomes, and leveraging these relationships in the design of novel interfaces and systems to support people in work.