Christos Themistocleous will be presenting the following paper at Persuasive’25, attempting a conceptual differentiation on the nature and root causes of spillovers and misfires in nudging, with the goal of deriving a design framework to assist nudge designers in mitigating the possible adverse effects of their nudge intervention.

• Themistocleous, C. and Karapanos, E. (2025) When Nudges Backfire: A Distinction Between Spillovers and Misfires, In Adjunct Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Persuasive Technology,  Limassol, Cyprus, May 5-12, 2025, Springer.

I gave the closing keynote speech at the ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT). Interesting conference I was not aware of, on a topic close to heart. A lot of interesting work with a strong focus on sensing. I hope to see this community grow and strengthen its ties with the Social Sciences and Design.

Evangelos will be giving a keynote speech at Persuasive Technology 2022 that takes place on March 29-31, 2022. The conference will be virtual this year due to COVID-19. Registration is open and free.

We’re joining the upcoming panel on “Teaching a Persuasive Technology course” that takes place as part of the Persuasive Technology 2021 conference. We’re looking forward to the much needed discussion!

Panel session: Teaching a Persuasive Technology Course

Moderator: Dena Al-Thani, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar

Panel Members:

• Harri Oinas-Kukkonen, Oulu University, Finland
• Evangelos Karapanos, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
• Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen, University of Twente, the Netherlands
• Raian Ali, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar

On March 9, I gave a keynote at the closing event of the project ‘Mobile monitoring of movement and joint loading in persons with degenerative hip- and knee problems’,  at the University of Hasselt. The talk’s slides can be found here.

My flight was affected by the Ciara storm, but I ended up giving the talk remotely, as part of a two-day workshop on “Considering Health Behavior Change” that took place back in February, in Eindhoven, NL. It went surprisingly well according to comments, and turned out to be an early preview of what was coming. Slides can be found here.

One of our very own, Rúben Gouveia, successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Tracking in the wild: Exploring the everyday use of physical activity trackers”. Rúben is moving to the University of Twente as an Assistant Professor as of Sept 1st, 2019. Rúben! it has been more than a pleasure!

We had the pleasure of hosting between February and April 2019, Elçin Hancı – Ph.D. candidate at the Human-Technology Interaction group of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Elcin’s working hypothesis, in her PhD studies, is that we treat physical activity trackers as social actors. Her work involves experimental studies of social effects on participants’ perceptions of the tracker, and motivation for physical activity (see her recent publication at Persuasive’19). We had a lot of interesting discussions and worked towards a joint publication. The photo depicts Elçin and the rest of the lab – Chrysanthi, Georgia and Loukas (from right to left) – as happy student volunteers at the Persuasive’19 conference that we hosted here in Limassol. Elçin, it was a pleasure!

Ruben Gouveia has been selected as a finalist for the Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at Ubicomp 2018 along with four other students from Cornell University, the University of Washington and Stuttgart University. The award was given to Alex Mariakakis from the University of Washington. More information at: http://ubicomp.org/sc/awards.html

Ruben is finishing his PhD studies at University of Madeira, under the supervision of Dr. Evangelos Karapanos. Ruben’s work has tried to understand how users engage with physical activity trackers and to design appropriate strategies that increase user engagement and lead to behavior change. More information about Ruben’s work can be found at https://rubengouveia.com/

We’re proudly hosting Persuasive’19 in Limassol, from April 9 to 11, 2019. Persuasive Technology (PT) is a vibrant interdisciplinary research community, focusing on the design, development and evaluation of interactive technologies aimed at changing people’s attitudes or behaviors through persuasion and social influence, but not through coercion or deception.

Dr. Tuomas Kari visited our lab during the period 3-7.9.2018. His background is in information systems science, and his main research interest lays in the use of technology in everyday life, especially in the context of health and wellness. During the visit, Tuomas gave a talk on exertion games and gamification, and we talked about our mutual research interests, and explored opportunities for collaboration.

The official kick-off of the H2020 project Co-Inform took place in May’18. Co-Inform is about empowering citizens, journalists and policy-makers with co-created socio-technical solutions, to increase resilience to misinformation and to generate more informed behaviours and policies. The aim of Co-Inform is to co-create this solutions with citizens, journalists and policy-makers for:

• Detecting and combating a variety of misinforming posts and articles on social media;
• Supporting, persuading and nourishing misinformation-resilient behaviour;
• Bridging between the public on social media, external fact-checking journalists, and policy-makers;
• Understanding and predicting which misinforming news and contents are likely to spread across which parts of the network and demographic sectors;
• Infiltrating echo-chambers on social media to expose confirmation-biased networks to different perceptions and corrective information; and
• Providing policy-makers with advanced misinformation analysis to support their policy-making processes and validation.

Our work will explore the design of technological interventions that nudge individuals towards misinformation-resilient behaviours. CUT is further represented by Dr. Elena Kyza (PI) and Dr. Dionysis Panos.

We had the pleasure of welcoming two research visitors over the past months.

Mr Olli Korhonen, PhD student at the Interact Research Unit of the University of Oulu, advised by Prof. Minna Isomursu, visited our lab between January and February 2018 (16.1-13.2) as part of a short-term scientific mission in the context of the European Network for the Joint Evaluation of Connected Health Technologies. Olli’s work focuses on the personalisation of e-health services. The scope of Olli’s visit was to inquire into the nature of personalisation in the context of health behavior change technologies, across three domains of activity of the lab – gamification, goal-setting and nudging.

Our own Rúben Gouveia, who is completing his PhD studies at the University of Madeira and Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, visited our lab between October 2017 and February 2018. During his time here, Rúben designed and conducted a field trial of a novel smartwatch application for the promotion of physical activity. He is currently analyzing the data and planning the write-up of what is expected to be the last study in his thesis. In the meantime, Ruben also got a full paper accepted at the top-tier ACM CHI conference.

We’re involved in the organisation of the Persuasive’18 conference to be held in Waterloo, Canada. Deadline for papers: November 1, 2017. Submit!

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PERSUASIVE 2018 (PT-18)

The 13th International Conference on Persuasive Technology

April 16-19, 2018, Waterloo, Canada

Paper submission deadline: November 1, 2017

http://www.persuasive2018.org

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Administration: Krystina Bednarowski

We will be co-organizing a workshop on New Directions for Self-Quantification for Behavior Change as part of Mobile HCI  2017 in Vienna. Submit your paper and join us!

New Directions in Self-Quantification for Behavior Change – Call for Papers
Workshop at MobileHCI
September 4th, 2017
Vienna, Austria

Organization:

Elisabeth Kersten – van Dijk, Eindhoven University of Technology
Naomi Jacobs, Eindhoven University of Technology
Heleen Rutjes, Eindhoven University of Technology
Marc Hassenzahl, University of Siegen
Evangelos Karapanos, Cyprus University of Technology
Boris de Ruyter, Philips Research, Radboud University Nijmegen
Wijnand IJsselsteijn, Eindhoven University of Technology

https://sites.google.com/site/selfquantification/

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The vision of the Quantified Self proposes that by gathering data about ourselves, we can gain insight into what makes us tick and shed light on avenues for self-improvement. However, examples from practice show that obtaining insight from data, let alone achieving long-term behavior change, is not trivial. In addition, self-tracking may have unintended side effects and hidden assumptions which complicate its effects. In this interactive workshop, we aim to bring together researchers from various fields with an interest in behavior change support systems, to compile an interdisciplinary, critical perspective on the use of self-quantification for behavior change.

Perspectives that are of interest to the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

– From data to action: How and to what extent do users understand and believe their data, and does it lead to new, actionable and meaningful insights? How can we help users translate their data into action?

– Unintended effects: What are the side effects of self-quantification and how can we investigate these?

– Individual differences: What individual differences change the effects of self-quantification, both stable (e.g., personality, socio-cultural background, gender) and temporary characteristics (e.g., mood, situational characteristics)?

– Ethical perspectives: how should we incorporate ethical considerations in the design of applications employing self-quantification for behavior change?

– Methodological perspectives: Which methods can be applied to answer the questions above?

https://sites.google.com/site/selfquantification/

** To participate **

Submit a position paper of 2-4 pages in SIGCHI extended abstracts format. Research results are not required; we invite specifically ideas and research in early stages.

Submissions will be reviewed by the organizers based on relevance and expected contribution to the discussion in the workshop.

Please direct queries and paper submissions to selfquantification@tue.nl.

– The deadline for submission of workshop contributions is May 19th, 2017

– Notification will be sent to authors on June 9th, 2017

Please note that at least one author of each accepted position paper must register and attend the workshop. All workshop participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the main conference. Please register before the early registration deadline of June 19th.

https://sites.google.com/site/selfquantification/

https://mobilehci.acm.org/2017/workshops-about.html

We received two awards at the 12th International conference on Persuasive Technology. The best paper award went to Ana’s work on Subly, while Ligia, just on the very start of her PhD, won the best poster award.  Well done girls!

We gave a talk in the WUD’16 Tallinn and WUD@ITMO events. The slides of the presentation are attached below.

Together with Ruben Gouveia and Marc Hassenzahl, we received an Honorable Mention Award for Best Paper for the paper How Do We Engage With Activity Trackers? A Longitudinal Study of Habito. The Honorable Mention Award is given to a paper that was identified by the Program Committee as being among the top 5% of all submissions to UbiComp 2015. UbiComp is the premier interdisciplinary conference in the field of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and a top-ranked international conference in computer science.