Brain Data Group

MobileHCI'23 Hybrid Workshop

The Future of Cognitive Personal Informatics

26th Sept 2023 - MobileHCI'23 - Athens, Greece & Online

Note: registered MobileHCI attendees may join the workshop even if they do not have a contribution accepted.

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 life? How can we mitigate potential ethical concerns? These issues are different from physiologically controlled interactions, such as BCIs, to a time when we have new data about ourselves. This workshop will be the first to 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 before it arrives.

The Aims of the Workshop

Enable emerging micro-community to present insights from their research
Develop the community agenda initially laid out at the 2022 SIG discussion
Collectively plan community development activities for the future
Strengthen the network between researchers and foster interdisciplinary collaboration in the community

Read the PDF

Call for Participation

This workshop explores the potential of cognitive personal informatics, which utilises physiological signals and wearable tech to track cognitive activity, stress levels, focus, and fatigue. With advancements in engineering and machine learning, we can use this data to shape our goals and change our behaviours. Instead, this workshop looks forward to when our cognitive activity can be easily tracked and presents itself as a new form of personal informatics that we might use to shape our goals and change our behaviours.

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

Studies of how people manage their cognitive activity frequently and or longitudinally.
Research that shapes our understanding of CPI.
Research into communities that could benefit from or be harmed by (mis)use of CPI.
Research into the design of systems or applications for CPI.
Research into how cognitive activity is conceptualised and understood by people.
And to match the conference theme:Research focused on 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) Short research summaries (4-6 pages), 2) Perspectives papers (e.g. essay or design fiction) (4-6 pages), or 3) Attendee abstracts (1 page) that describe a perspective you can contribute. All submissions should be in single-column ACM format. We do not require submissions to be anonymous, but authors can submit anonymous if they prefer. Authors of research summaries and perspectives papers will be encouraged to record a 5-min video presenting the content of their submission, which will be shared before the workshop, and available after.

Early Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2023
Notifications of acceptance: Mid July, 2023
Camera-ready: TBC

Rolling deadline until Workshop
Notification of acceptabnce: within 2 weeks
Camrea Ready: TBC

Submission link: Submit online

Note: The submission system mentions titles being fixed for the ACM digital library, but proceedings will not end up in the ACM digital library. We may aim to publish a proceedings in a workshop proceedings platform.

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

Join our Slack Read the Blog

The Hyrbid Workshop Plan

The workshop will by hybrid, led by Schneegass, Maior, and Chiossi in person, and Wilson, Cox, and Wiese online. We plan for periods of synchronisation, separate activities online and offline, and aysnchronous sharing of research before and after the meeting.

Accepted Contributions

Research: Planning for FamilyBloom: Helping ADHD children and Family Co-Regulation through Tracking and Reflecting, by L. Silva, G. Hayes, D. Epstein. [PDF]
Research: When High Mental Workload is Good and Low Mental Workload is Bad, by J. Shaban, M. Roy, M. Stephens-Marsh, M.L. Wilson, and S. Sharples. [PDF]
Research: Using Physiological Sensors and Infrared Imaging in Evaluations of the Impact of Smart Cycling Technologies on Cycling Experience, by M. Boot, B. Ulak, K. Geurs, and P. Havinga. [PDF]
Research: Personalized Eating Disorder Care on the Mobile Dietary and Emotional Diary System, by I. Kim. [PDF]
Research: Designing Apps to Track Mental Workload, by M.L. Wilson, J. Shaban, X. Ma, M. Shalliker, S. Midha, and S. Sharples. [PDF]
Attendee Abstract: Personal Informatics Ecologies, by A. Aladwan
Attendee Abstract: The Future of Equitable Human-AI Collaboration, by E. Doherty

Outcomes of the workshop

[click on image to open board]

Planned Workshop Structure

Note: the plan may still change depending on e.g. the balance of online and in-person participants.

Session 1: Common Ground

We will organise into mixed groups of expertise methods, and share research questions and bring them together to create a post-it style mindmap of the research agendas in the group.

Session 2: Research Roots Panel

We aim to have a panel made up of expertise that relates to the central background research areas, to bring their perspectives to the room on which key contributions from the field will most shape the CogPI agenda.

Discussion Lunch

TBC: depending on the arrangements for lunch at the conference, we plan to get groups to discuss what the consider to be the key research challenges from the morning.

Session 3: Future Ethics Concerns

We consider it an important session for the day to reflect on the key ethics concerns raised by the idea of tracking cognitive behaviour. The aim is to consolidate key issues for future research, and raise awareness of them.

Session 4: Future Research Plans

Given the days discussions, we plan to enable future reserach in this area by producing a series of story cards for motivating scenarios, as a communnity resource that can guide and be expanded by future work.

Organisers

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.

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.

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.

Francesco Chiossi

is a PhD researcher in the Media Informatics Group at the Department of Computer Science of LMU Munich. He obtained an M.Sc. from the University of Padua in neuroscience and applied cognitive science. His work focuses on implicit measures of human behaviour, such as electrodermal activity and electroencephalography, as an implicit input to design physiologically-adaptive systems across the virtuality continuum. More recently, he is also interested in the effect of digital media and context switching on our cognitive capacity.

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.

Jason Wiese

is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Jason's research is positioned in personal informatics and personal data and spans multiple domains related to health, well-being, and accessibility. Much of his recent work has focused on people with upper-body motor impairments, especially high-level spinal cord injuries.