3rd Workshop on Affective and Attitude User Modeling

Assessing and Adapting to User Attitudes and Affect:
Why, When and How?

in conjunction with User Modeling 2003 

Pittsburgh, PA, USA
June 22, 2003

Workshop Summary Presented at UM 03

Background and Motivation
Focus Questions
Accepted Papers and Posters
Complete CFP

Please consult the 
main conference website
for details regarding registration and accomodations.

All contributions will be made available on the Workshop Web site and published as part of an informal Annex to the main UM03 conference proceeding

Background and Motivation:

User modeling has traditionally focused on what is generally considered "cognitive" and "rational" aspects of user behavior; typically the user's knowledge and belief state. While useful, models focusing strictly on these aspects of user state often miss critical components of user mental state and behavior: affective states (e.g., basic affect such as like/dislike reactions; emotions such as frustration, fear, happiness, anger, etc.; moods), and attitudes (e.g. trust, doubt, etc.). These factors have also been referred to as "extrarational" and shown to strongly influence both reasoning and communication. Over the past 5 years much progress has been made in a number of areas relevant to the assessment and modeling of these factors. This third workshop addressing affective and attitude user modeling issues follows the first and second workshops, held in Banff, BC, 1999 and Sonthofen, Germany (2001)

As before, the main goal is to provide an opportunity for a focused exchange of ideas about this emerging subfield of user modeling. To this end, this 3rd one day workshop will address a variety of issues related to assessing user attitudes, affective states, and personality traits. The overall aim will be to explore core issues regarding the assessment, modeling, and adaptation to these states, across a range of applications (e.g., decision support systems, training and tutoring, telehealth and VR applications). These issues will include the following: 

    Why is it important to assess these factors? What can be gained by augmenting current user models to include these factors?
    When should these factors be assessed (and adapted to), and when is it safe to ignore them? Are there situations when this type of assessment and adaptation might interfere with the human-machine interaction and the task at hand?
    What are the best methods available to accomplish this assessment, modeling, and adaptation? Can existing user modeling methods be adapted to include these factors, or must new methods and techniques be developed?
By addressing these issues in a mixed-mode, informal set of interactions, we hope to explore the feasibility and utility of attitude, affect, and personality user modeling, identify key problems to address, and contribute to advancing the state of the art of this emerging area of research.