Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Persuasive technologies (PT) have become ubiquitous. They are used to engage users in social networks and in apps that help people change their behaviours to improve their health, reduce waste, save energy, manage spending, and many other good causes. In our previous work we have shown that Personalization increases significantly the effectiveness of PT, and we proposed various user features and methods to design Personalized PT (PPT) in different domains. However, ethical concerns were raised in recent years culminating in the 2019 US Congress Hearing on Persuasive Technologies. The main concerns are that PPT are not transparent, can be too engaging and manipulative, and can be used for exploitative purposes. The long-term vision of the proposed research is to address these ethical concerns by developing computational methodologies, frameworks, techniques and tools that: (Obj. 1) make PPT auditable, inspectable and transparent through certificates, thus enabling a market for certification and control of personalized PT;  (Obj. 2) automatically negotiate on behalf of the user the acceptable persuasive purposes, strategies, and data used for personalization and ensure transparency and control by the user. This research will develop methods for creating trust certificates for PPT. Furthermore, automatic methods for analysing the certificates and visualizing them to the user will be developed, ensuring transparency, as well as methods to compare them with the stated user preferences allowing the user to disable risky PPT. We will also develop methods and tools for automatic negotiation of admissible persuasive strategies according to the user's preferences, with the possibility of allowing strategies that are not manipulative, or are aligned with the user's goals. Finally, we will develop tools for users to inspect their personalization models, and will use these tools to stimulate users' self-awareness and help them overcome their cognitive biases. People are losing millions of hours of productivity, rob their loved ones from real interaction, and spend their money on things they don't need, because they are manipulated by stealth exploitative PPT. My research will create tools to make PPT transparent and controllable by users. It will enable a new market for services that certify trustworthy PPT, that will create new jobs in the Canadian economy. There has been no previous work on computational techniques making PPT accountable and transparent to the user. So far only legislation measures have been discussed, but banning PPT is not a good option, as PPT have many beneficial uses. The proposed research will provide training for 12 HQP and, by making pioneering scientific and technological contributions within a nascent field, will influence other researchers. The resulting methods, technologies and tools will profoundly impact how people use social media and persuasive applications.