Candidate for MSCA IF 2017 at GTI-IA, Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación (DSIC). Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)

Brief description of the institution:

Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) is the single Spanish

Technical University that features in the main University world

rankings. It is within the top 5 Spanish Universities with the highest

revenue from both public research and knowledge transfer activities, and

a national leader in patent license income and start up creation.

Constituted in 1971, it comprises nearly 30.000 students, over 2500

academics, and 17 university research centres of excellence.

UPV has a relevant experience in the participation in international

research programmes, with over 100 FP7 projects and 60 H2020 projects in

the period 2014-2016. UPV researchers are also actively involved in all

H2020 life program stages, from workprogramme drafting discussions, to

project coordination. It is also taking part in several major partnering

initiatives (JTIs, PPPs, KICs…).

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group (including URL if applicable):

The Artiʼncial Intelligence and Information Technology Group (GTI-IA)

of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) main research areas

include agreement technologies, multi-agent systems, complex networks

and big data analysis, intelligent manufacturing systems, simulation,

recommender and decision support systems, and persuasion technologies.

The group was a Spanish node of the European network of Agreement

Technologies COST. It was also member of the following excellence

networks: Agentcities.ES, Agentcities.NET, Agent Link I, II and Agent

Link Agent Link III.

The contributions of the group to the

specialized literature and to technology transfer to the industry are a

result of its participation in successful national and international

research projects (65) and also in projects with industry or business

partners (8).

Project description:

Persuasive Cognitive Assistants

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications possess the capability to

promote security and comfort for the users, trying to provide an

integrated solution that connects several distinct devices to services

to form a unique solution. AAL applications can perceive the

environment, monitoring events, and provide an adjusted and timely

response that enables it to interact with the users. However, these

features are not enough by themselves. The aim is to accommodate people,

and people change their needs and behaviors. These important aspects

are not taken into account in current AAL applications. Specifically,

AAL applications suffer from different problems to be directly used to

persuade human behavior, mainly related with the social environment of

each individual. Often the target audiences are large and heterogeneous,

and include users with wide-ranging goals and preferences. Thus,

persuading the audience effectively with a one-size-fits-all persuasive

intervention is difficult.

This research tries to overcome the lack

of reason and justification of why the suggested events should be

performed by users in current AAL frameworks. This problem may lead to

the withdrawal of the system by the users. A major advance would be to

include persuasive methods that may provide a motive to that specific

event scheduling and compel the users to attend to it. Several studies

demonstrated that the argumentation of recommended items has a strong

impact to the user, including direct feedback from the user and

providing alternative options which better fits the user needs and

expectations.

Applications

CV, 1 letter of motivation, 2 recommendation letters