Session

Behavioral Computing: Building Tools to Align Our Decisions With Our Goals

Kevin Hill · Pebble

A common thread runs through recent developments in the areas of wearables, IoT, AI, mobile computing and cloud computing. It is a desire to understand, adapt to, and improve human behavior.

Perhaps the single aspect of human behavior that is most ripe for innovation is the habitual mismatch between long-term goals and moment to moment decision making.

To create useful tools to address this opportunity, it is critical that we understand the neurobiological and economic knowledge we have gained related to the distinction between goals and decisions, and the key features that these fields demonstrate are needed to tackle this problem.

Given the requirements from our knowledge of human behavior, wearables are uniquely positioned to provide the central piece of systems that optimize short-term decisions to align with long-term goals due to the consistency of data captured about an individual and the ability to shorten the information-action feedback loop to an end user.

This talk will provide an analysis of the fields of human decision making and goal directed behavior, and discuss the steps that are needed turn the theoretical knowledge into practice.

(This talk will also include an update on our collaboration with Stanford’s Mobilize group)