Behavior Informatics and Analytics is a new scientific field that is to develop methodologies, techniques and practical tools for representing, modeling, analyzing, understanding and utilizing human behavior, behavioral interaction and network, behavioral patterns, behavioral impacts, the formation of behavior-oriented groups and collective intelligence, and behavioral intelligence emergence.

In understanding and solving many issues and problems, Behavior emerges as a key focus, in both artificial and human societies. Behavior connects to many entities and objects, such as behavior subjects, objects, causes, impacts, scenarios and constraints. In addition, many relevant behaviors consist of social behavior network, which involves social, organizational and collective intelligence. To effectively understand such behavior, it is vitally important to build formal methods and workable tools for behavior representation, processing and engineering, namely behavior informatics and analytics.

With the development of foundations and technical tools for BIA, it is helpful for us to effectively understand, model, represent, analyze and utilize behavior and social behavior network toward problem understanding and solving. This includes but is not limited to behavior understanding, exceptional behavior analysis, opportunities use, behavior pattern analysis, behavior impact analysis, and cause-effect analysis.

Behavior Informatics and Analytics is a multidisciplinary research issue, which may involve knowledge in areas such as user modeling, representation, ontological engineering, semantic web, data mining and knowledge discovery, artificial intelligence, machine learning, system simulation, artificial social system, open complex systems, swarm intelligence, impact analysis, risk analysis, social network analysis, group formation, organizational behavior analysis, cause-effect analysis, reasoning and learning. Domain knowledge is crucial for behavior understanding and analysis in that specific area.