Introduction to IoB: Internet of Behaviors Minitrack

Internet of Behaviors (IoB) links human behavior to the digital world to provide services that meet humans' dynamic needs. IoB can observe and record human behaviors (physical and mental alike), analyze them, adapt itself accordingly, and continuously affect humans' decisions in implicit and explicit ways. A crucial point is understanding human individual and social behaviors, which are reactions to various internal or external events. For instance, intentions and emotions that cause specific behaviors could be analyzed and further impacted by stimuli toward different behaviors. At the social level, people's social attachment to each other or their belongings could influence their behaviors. At the cultural level, behaviors could be impacted by expressiveness, mobility habits, social interactions, and privacy concerns of a country or region's population. Therefore, while IoB opts to engineer intelligent connected systems adaptive to behaviors, it will only be effective with a deep behavioral analysis from social and psychological perspectives. A novelty IoB provides is that it considers not only the direct users but also citizens, occupants, visitors, or customers who may not directly interact with the system and may mostly be unaware that they are part of the system but could benefit from the way the system works. The IoB minitrack at HICSS 2023 aims to shape a community around the novel concept of IoB. Since IoB is yet to be discovered, its various dimensions should be discussed by academics, industry, and political decision-makers. The success of IoB depends on applicable dimensions regarding ethics, privacy, artificial intelligence (AI), and more.