10 research outputs found
Top-k Route Search through Submodularity Modeling of Recurrent POI Features
We consider a practical top-k route search problem: given a collection of
points of interest (POIs) with rated features and traveling costs between POIs,
a user wants to find k routes from a source to a destination and limited in a
cost budget, that maximally match her needs on feature preferences. One
challenge is dealing with the personalized diversity requirement where users
have various trade-off between quantity (the number of POIs with a specified
feature) and variety (the coverage of specified features). Another challenge is
the large scale of the POI map and the great many alternative routes to search.
We model the personalized diversity requirement by the whole class of
submodular functions, and present an optimal solution to the top-k route search
problem through indices for retrieving relevant POIs in both feature and route
spaces and various strategies for pruning the search space using user
preferences and constraints. We also present promising heuristic solutions and
evaluate all the solutions on real life data.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
Who wants to join me? Companion recommendation in location based social networks
We consider the problem of identifying possible companions for a user who is planning to visit a given venue. Specifically, we study the task of predicting which of the user's current friends, in a location based social network (LBSN), are most likely to be interested in joining the visit. An important underlying assumption of our model is that friendship relations can be clustered based on the kinds of interests that are shared by the friends. To identify these friendship types, we use a latent topic model, which moreover takes into account the geographic proximity of the user to the location of the proposed venue. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first that addresses the task of recommending companions for a proposed activity. While a number of existing topic models can be adapted to make such predictions, we experimentally show that such methods are significantly outperformed by our model
Customized tour recommendations in urban areas
The ever-increasing urbanization coupled with the unprecedented capacity to collect and process large amounts of data have helped to create the vision of intelligent urban environments. One key aspect of such environments is that they allow people to effectively navigate through their city. While GPS technology and route-planning services have undoubtedly helped towards this direction, there is room for improvement in intelligent urban navigation. This vision can be fostered by the proliferation of location-based social networks, such as Foursquare or Path, which record the physical presence of users in different venues through check-ins. This information can then be used to enhance intelligent urban navigation, by generating customized path recommendations for users. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recommending customized tours in urban settings. These tours are generated so that they consider (a) the different types of venues that the user wants to visit, as well as the order in which the user wants to visit them, (b) limitations on the time to be spent or distance to be covered, and (c) the merit of visiting the included venues. We capture these requirements in a generic definition that we refer to as the TourRec problem. We then introduce two instances of the TourRec problem, study their complexity, and propose efficient algorithmic solutions. Our experiments on real data collected from Foursquare demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms and the practical utility of the reported recommendations. © 2014 ACM