Design and implementation of an RFID-based customer shopping behavior mining system

Shopping behavior data is of great importance in understanding the effectiveness of marketing and merchandising campaigns. Online clothing stores are capable of capturing customer shopping behavior by analyzing the click streams and customer shopping carts. Retailers with physical clothing stores, however, still lack effective methods to comprehensively identify shopping behaviors. In this paper, we show that backscatter signals of passive RFID tags can be exploited to detect and record how customers browse stores, which garments they pay attention to, and which garments they usually pair up. The intuition is that the phase readings of tags attached to items will demonstrate distinct yet stable patterns in a time-series when customers look at, pick out, or turn over desired items. We design ShopMiner, a framework that harnesses these unique spatial-temporal correlations of time-series phase readings to detect comprehensive shopping behaviors. We have implemented a prototype of ShopMiner with a COTS RFID reader and four antennas, and tested its effectiveness in two typical indoor environments. Empirical studies from two-week shopping-like data show that ShopMiner is able to identify customer shopping behaviors with high accuracy and low overhead, and is robust to interference.Department of Computing2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalbcr

Greater Space Means More Service: Leveraging the innovative power of architecture and design

Organizational structures certainly are of great importance in order to determine employees’ behaviour and performance. On the other hand, physical structures also significantly influence the way staff and customers view any company and interact with it. In service based activity, such as in retailing, banking, hospitality, and so, firms and institutions are competing thanks to innovations in products/services, delivery processes, and management styles. Innovative approaches may also materialize into the design of facilities. Service providers are in a position to significantly improve convenience, productivity, and attractiveness by designing space and defining appropriate layout carefully. This pattern also has to include identification of the meanings, characterization of size and qualification of the process by which any service facility delivers messages. In the last session of the paper, we address a particular type of service facilities, namely the buildings of institutions for higher education in management. The objective is then to analyze how facilities have evolved in order to cope with the change affecting business education.Service; innovation; architecture; working place; corporate symbols

Analyzing web behavior in indoor retail spaces

We analyze 18- million rows of Wi-Fi access logs collected over a 1-year period from over 120,000 anonymized users at an inner city shopping mall. The anonymized data set gathered from an opt-in system provides users' approximate physical location as well as web browsing and some search history. Such data provide a unique opportunity to analyze the interaction between people's behavior in physical retail spaces and their web behavior, serving as a proxy to their information needs. We found that (a) there is a weekly periodicity in users' visits to the mall; (b) people tend to visit similar mall locations and web content during their repeated visits to the mall; (c) around 60% of registered Wi-Fi users actively browse the web, and around 10% of them use Wi-Fi for accessing web search engines; (d) people are likely to spend a relatively constant amount of time browsing the web while the duration of their visit may vary; (e) the physical spatial context has a small, but significant, influence on the web content that indoor users browse; and (f) accompanying users tend to access resources from the same web domains

Values and symbols: An intercultural analysis of web pages on the Internet

The author examines how a North American commercial Web site developed by Environmental Systems Research Institute serves as a vehicle through which American hegemony and cultural imperialism are propagated to Latin America. The author argues that the content of the web site pages, which contain American cultural symbols and values, may serve to influence or change the values of its Latin American visitors

I4S: Capturing shopper’s in-store interactions

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under IDM Futures Funding; Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Points of Interest (POI): a commentary on the state of the art, challenges, and prospects for the future

In this commentary, we describe the current state of the art of points of interest (POIs) as digital, spatial datasets, both in terms of their quality and affordings, and how they are used across research domains. We argue that good spatial coverage and high-quality POI features — especially POI category and temporality information — are key for creating reliable data. We list challenges in POI geolocation and spatial representation, data fidelity, and POI attributes, and address how these challenges may affect the results of geospatial analyses of the built environment for applications in public health, urban planning, sustainable development, mobility, community studies, and sociology. This commentary is intended to shed more light on the importance of POIs both as standalone spatial datasets and as input to geospatial analyses