Human behavior is cultural, contextual, and idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, it is adaptive in the short term. The challenges of automatically interpreting complex behavioral patterns generated when humans interact with machines or with others are still open, including the joint modeling of behavioral cues taking place at different time scales, the inherent uncertainty of machine detectable evidences of human behavior, the mutual influence of people involved in interactions, the presence of long term dependencies in observations extracted from human behavior, and the important role of dynamics in human behavior understanding.

2nd International Workshop on Human Behaviour Understanding gathers researchers dealing with the problem of modeling human behavior under its multiple facets (expression of emotions, display of complex social and relational behaviors, performance of individual or joint actions, etc.), with particular attention to systems that aim to induce behavioral change in their users. Concrete examples are intelligent tutoring systems that rely on analysis to provide feedback (e.g. sign language tutoring based on gesture analysis), healthcare systems that improve the patients’ physical or cognitive well-being, interactive games that serve beneficial purposes (e.g. improving fitness), technologies that promote positive behavioral change (e.g. environmental sustainability and better life-styles), to name a few. The joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence, one of the most important events in the Ambient Intelligence community, has a clear contiguity with the purposes of the workshop, and we expect it to be an excellent meeting ground for theory- and application-related aspects of the subject.