We are currently standing on the brink of a new era of computing systems: Moving on from desktop computers, computing intelligence will be woven into the “fabric of everyday life”, seamlessly and near-invisibly pervading our environment and delivering services adapted to ourselves and our context of use.

One of the key aspects of such user-centric pervasive-adaptive systems is their ability to sense and react to the user's mood and intentions. Different aspects are taken into account: emotional state (e.g. annoyance), cognitive engagement (e.g. high mental workload), and physical conditions and actions (e.g. temperature and movement). The combination of these features together with recognizable human behavioural patterns form the personal awareness of the system. Additionally, information about the surroundings is gathered and used to establish environmental awareness. Considering this, the overall goal is to create systems that are able to derive, suggest and perform actions to optimize user comfort and performance, assisting people in their specific activities and situations (for example driving a car or at work).

In order to find ways of realizing the intended kind of user-centric pervasive adaptivity, several issues have to be addressed that require research in different disciplines, most prominently psychology, interaction design and computer science. To begin with, psychology has to provide methods to sense, analyse and influence the psycho-physiological state of the system's users. These results could then be taken into account to optimize the design of interactions between the user and the system. The main concern of computer science is to establish a basis that allows autonomous computer systems to interpret the acquired sensor data and make reasonable decisions about which adaptation steps to conduct. Besides this, the complexity of pervasive adaptivity calls for novel software engineering approaches and architectures that are able to support the development process by addressing the special dynamic properties of the aspired systems.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different fields of expertise, lead to a better understanding between them, and to promote interaction in this new and interdisciplinary area. All in all, we want to create an opportunity for the participants to exchange about a wide range of topics related to pervasive adaptation and “awareness of the user”, covering theoretical aspects as well as practical methods, concrete applications, system architectures or use cases.