Call for Papers

Workshop Theme and Goals

In the advancing ubiquitous computing age, computing technology has already spread into many aspects of our daily lives, such as office work, home and housekeeping, health management, transportation, and even cities. We experience the influence of those technologies which are both contributing to a better quality of life (QoL) in our individual and collective lives, and causing new types of stress and challenges at the same time. The term "well-being" has recently gained attention as a concept that covers our general happiness spanning physical, psychological, and social wellness.

An increasing number of researchers, engineers, and practitioners are paying attention to how their work can contribute to a better quality of life, social good, and well-being. Despite recent activities in academia and society, unified academic research activities on computing and well-being are still underexplored within the ubicomp research community. Active research not only in the HCI domain but in various other ubicomp research areas (systems, mobile/wearable sensing, mobile computing, persuasive applications and services, behaviour change, etc.) is needed towards drawing the big picture of "computing for well-being" from different viewpoints and layers of computing. For example, an additional viewpoint of users' well-being in activity recognition research may invent new types of applications that comprehensively cover different types of recognition of users' physical, mental, and social activities. Ever since Mark Weiser introduced the term ubiquitous computing, the ubiquity of computing in our daily lives and society has been certainly progressing. Now it is time for the community to more seriously envision the benefits that such computing technologies can bring.

Following our successful 6 workshops at UbiComp/ISWC (WellComp 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023), this year we will bring together people from industry and academia who are active in the areas of activity recognition, mental health, context-awareness and ubiquitous computing. The main objective of WellComp 2024 is to share the latest research in various areas of computing, related to users' physical, mental, and social well-being. Relevance to such topics will be considered in the paper review and selection process. Furthermore, the workshop aims to identify future research challenges, research opportunities, and applications of our research outcomes to society.

The topics of interest include -but are not limited- to the following:

• Measurement and representation of physical, mental, and social well-being with ubicomp technologies
• Design and implementation of platforms for collecting, processing, and interpreting health and well-being data
• Design and development of computational models predictive of one or several aspects of well-being.
• Leveraging large foundation models to improve computing for wellbeing.
• Unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning for well-being.
• Classification, regression, and clustering problems related to well-being aspects.
• Approaches addressing challenges in wearable sensor data (e.g., missing and noisy data, irregular sampling rates, few labels, out-of-distribution inputs, etc) used for well-being.
• Development of explainable, robust, privacy-aware, and trustworthy pipelines for well-being monitoring.
• Multi-modal approaches integrating information from several data sources (e.g., physiological, behavioral, audio).
• Fairness in computing systems for wellbeing.
• Ethical considerations from data collection, system development to deployment.
• Computing systems for promoting well-being-awareness.
• Innovative well-being applications and diverse target populations (e.g., children, patients, or elderly people).

Submission details

We will accept two types of papers long (6 pages) and short papers (4 pages) excluding the references in the double-column format. Both papers should use the ACM SIGCHI Master Article template as suggested in the UbiComp/ISWC 2024 submission guidelines and will be reviewed by at least two workshop technical committee members or organizers. Successful submissions will have the potential to raise discussion, provide insights for other attendees, and illustrate open challenges and potential solutions. All accepted publications will be published on the workshop website and the ACM Digital Library as part of the UbiComp/ISWC 2024 Adjunct Proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper needs to register for the conference and the workshop itself. During the workshop, each paper will be presented briefly by one of the authors.

All papers need to be anonymized. Any questions should be mailed to wellcomp2024@ubicomp.org.

Important Dates

• June 7, 2024 AoE June 17, 2024 AoE– Submission Deadline
• June 28, 2024 AoE July 12, 2024 AoE– Notification of Acceptance
• July 26, 2024 AoE – Camera-ready
• October 5-6, 2024 – Workshop Date