Leveraging Mobile App Classification and User Context Information for Improving Recommendation Systems

Mobile apps play a significant role in current online environments where there is an overwhelming supply of information. Although mobile apps are part of our daily routine, searching and finding mobile apps is becoming a nontrivial task due to the current volume, velocity and variety of information. Therefore, app recommender systems provide users’ desired apps based on their preferences. However, current recommender systems and their underlying techniques are limited in effectively leveraging app classification schemes and context information. In this thesis, I attempt to address this gap by proposing a text analytics framework for mobile app recommendation by leveraging an app classification scheme that incorporates the needs of users as well as the complexity of the user-item-context information in mobile app usage pattern. In this recommendation framework, I adopt and empirically test an app classification scheme based on textual information about mobile apps using data from Google Play store. In addition, I demonstrate how context information such as user social media status can be matched with app classification categories using tree-based and rule-based prediction algorithms. Methodology wise, my research attempts to show the feasibility of textual data analysis in profiling apps based on app descriptions and other structured attributes, as well as explore mechanisms for matching user preferences and context information with app usage categories. Practically, the proposed text analytics framework can allow app developers reach a wider usage base through better understanding of user motivation and context information

An Affordance-Based Framework for Human Computation and Human-Computer Collaboration

Visual Analytics is “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by visual interactive interfaces” [70]. The goal of this field is to develop tools and methodologies for approaching problems whose size and complexity render them intractable without the close coupling of both human and machine analysis. Researchers have explored this coupling in many venues: VAST, Vis, InfoVis, CHI, KDD, IUI, and more. While there have been myriad promising examples of human-computer collaboration, there exists no common language for comparing systems or describing the benefits afforded by designing for such collaboration. We argue that this area would benefit significantly from consensus about the design attributes that define and distinguish existing techniques. In this work, we have reviewed 1,271 papers from many of the top-ranking conferences in visual analytics, human-computer interaction, and visualization. From these, we have identified 49 papers that are representative of the study of human-computer collaborative problem-solving, and provide a thorough overview of the current state-of-the-art. Our analysis has uncovered key patterns of design hinging on human- and machine-intelligence affordances, and also indicates unexplored avenues in the study of this area. The results of this analysis provide a common framework for understanding these seemingly disparate branches of inquiry, which we hope will motivate future work in the field