****** Call for Papers ******
New frontiers of Quantified Self 3: Exploring understudied categories of users

International Workshop at the 2017 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), and the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), September 11-15, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii, USA.

Workshop homepage: https://newfrontiersqs3.wordpress.com/

Submission to: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nfqs3

For any inquiries please email: amon.rapp@gmail.com

****** Important Dates ******

Deadline for submissions: June 9, 2017
Response to authors: June 30, 2017
Camera ready submission deadline: July 10, 2017
Workshop day: September 12, 2017

All the accepted papers will be included in the ACM Digital Library and in the supplemental proceedings of the UbiComp Conference.

****** Motivation ******
The Quantified Self (QS) movement, which is also known as Personal Informatics (PI), has the aim to collect and use personal data through technological means for self-reflection and self-knowledge. Over recent years, a plethora of self-tracking devices have been developed both for research and commercial purposes. As a result, the practice of tracking personal data has also spread outside the avant-garde circle of quantified selfers, reaching a broader user population. However, despite a growing understanding of how self-trackers track, we know far less about how these tools can be used in specific contexts and communities of practice.

This is due to the fact that research has had a focus on the act of tracking per se, rather than the characteristics of the users, often exclusively emphasizing behavior change goals. This bias, on the one hand, has narrowed our perspective on the QS phenomenon, reducing its likely multifaceted nature to a common ground, and, on the other hand, risks undermining our capability to design PI tools for novel and specific contexts, characterized by individual’s existing habits and purposes.

In this new edition of the workshop we aim at exploring how specific, and still understudied, categories of users might track to address their personal and situated needs, how we can better design for them, and what particular user groups could be impacted by the increasing availability of personal data. This could also provide new opportunities for envisioning how collections of digital traces could go beyond behavior change to investigate new personalized services in e.g. work, education, entertainment, transportation, and health.

For example: how could people with mental disabilities, like autism or dementia, take advantage of the growing opportunities for tracking mental states? How could patients with a chronic disease, like diabetes, better manage their illness through QS tools? How could particular groups of workers, like employees, be affected by the pervasiveness of tracking, and what kind of ethical issues could arise? What kind of QS tools need to improve to support learning in elementary schools?

Toward this aim, it is necessary to consider a range of issues including:
i) how the same data may have different meanings for different user groups;
ii) how this information can be analyzed by populations that may have specific interaction needs;
iii) what kind of issues QS technologies should face when aiming at integrating in existing habits/conditions;
iv) how design can deal with ethical issues that may vary depending on the context;
v) how to make the data available in a useful form for people with limited technical expertise so they can explore the particular issues that matter to them.


****** Topics of interest ******
Relevant workshop topics include but are not limited to:
i) Novel self-tracking tools (e.g. wearable and ubiquitous technologies, mobile apps, etc.) for specific user groups, like stroke patients, manual workers, cyclists, etc.;
ii) Novel visualizations of personal data for people with distinctive interaction needs
iii) Methodologies and technologies for transforming data into knowledge and to help users make sense of their own data;
iv) Applications and services enabled by personal data in particular contexts;
v) Thought-provoking insights and theoretical reflections on how self-tracking tools could impact specific user groups in the future, and how we can face the challenges that this diversity poses for the research/design of QS tools
vi) Use cases that investigate the effectiveness of novel QS solutions for understudied user groups.


****** Workshop format ******
The one-day workshop will be divided in a presentation phase in which participants will briefly present their works and a design phase in which they will have to imagine, through small-group work, new solutions for getting closer the Quantified Self systems to the needs of specific user groups. To this aim, we will use a format aimed at quickly generating many ideas and solutions to a problem through sketching, exposition and critique.


****** Submissions ******

We will accept both position papers and research papers, case studies, future research challenges and reflections, four-to-six pages long.

Papers will be reviewed by the program committee based on their pertinence with the workshop topics, quality of the exposition and, mainly, potential to trigger discussions and insights for inspiring the design of new solutions during the workshop.

All workshop papers must be in the SIGCHI Extended Abstract format. Papers should be in pdf format, should not be anonymized and should be submitted to:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nfqs3

The deadline for submission is June 9, 2017.

****** Proceedings ******
The accepted workshop papers will be included in the ACM Digital Library and in the supplemental proceedings of the UbiComp Conference. After the workshop, we also plan to organize a special issue with the most relevant contributions in an International Journal.

****** Organizers ******

Amon Rapp, University of Torino
Federica Cena, University of Torino
Judy Kay, University of Sydney
Bob Kummerfeld, University of Sydney
Frank Hopfgartner, University of Glasgow
Till Plumbaum, Technische Universität Berlin
Jakob Eg Larsen, Technical University of Denmark
Daniel A. Epstein, University of Washington
Rúben Gouveia, Madeira Interactive Technologies