CFP: "Persuasive Technology," University of Aberdeen, April 1-2, 2008.

Can a web site persuade you to be politically active? Can a mobile phone motivate you to exercise? Does instant feedback on petrol use change how people drive? Do online rating systems inspire people to behave better online? This symposium will focus on how digital technology can motivate and influence people (or agents). It will bring together researchers, designers, and developers interested in computers designed to change attitudes and behaviors in positive ways. Call for papers: in a persuasive communication, a source tries to influence a receiver’s attitudes or behaviours through the use of messages. Each of these three components (the source, the receiver, and the messages) affects the effectiveness of persuasion. In addition, the type of communication (the way the message is delivered) can impact a message’s effectiveness. This symposium will bring together researchers working on all these aspects of persuasion, from persuasive argumentation to persuasive user interfaces. Persuasive technology has a great practical potential, for instance to improve health (encouraging a reduction in alcohol intake, smoking cessation, an increase in exercise, more healthy eating, and adherence to medical treatment) and to move towards sustainable living (encouraging a reduction in energy consumption, recycling, and use of public transport). There is a growing interest within the research community into persuasive technology, as shown by the emergence of the new Persuasive conference series (in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 2006; Stanford, US, 2007; Oulu, Finland, 2008), as well as the successful series of workshops on Computational Models of Natural Argument (an area overlapping with persuasion). For further information, see: http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~jmasthof/Persuasive/.