Ten scientific problems in human behavior understanding

Human behavior understanding is of great importance for a variety of applications, such as personalized recommendations, smart home, urban planning, and anti-terrorism. Although there has been significant progress on the understanding of human behaviors, we still face a number of theoretical and technical challenges that need be further explored. In this article, we first outline the basic research process of human behavior understanding based on existing studies, and illustrate important issues in each step. Afterwards we describe main research challenges from the aspects of human behavior itself, the behavior related data, as well as the modeling and evaluations, respectively. Then we identify and explore ten most important fundamental open problems in this field. The proposed problem list is expected to provoke innovative studies on human behavior understanding, e.g., theory improvement and data collaboration. In this article, we also discuss possible ways that would be helpful for resolving the challenging problems.