Location Based Recommendation Application

For our senior design project we decided to make an iOS application that could generate a list of nearby locations for the user to visit. We wanted the recommendation list to be unique for each user instead of a list of the most popular locations in the area. To accomplish this we developed our own recommendation algorithm from scratch. The algorithm uses a tagging system in which users and system administrators are able to add and modify the tags associated with locations. By using the tags associated with each location and with each user, our algorithm is able to generate a recommendation list tailored to the interests of each user. We made an intuitive user interface by creating a simple, clean layout for each screen the user see. We wanted the users to be able to glance at the screen and immediately know what is possible to do while at that screen and what is the purpose of said screen. We have clearly labeled buttons for each of the possible actions, and use color coordination to draw the users attention to important information. By the end of the project we had an application with an intuitive user interface and an algorithm that could achieve our goal. We still need to link the application, server, and algorithm together, so that they act as a single system. One this is done the core project will be functional, and we can begin adding in additional features

Ontology-based personalized job recommendation framework for migrants and refugees

Participation in the labor market is seen as the most important factor favoring long-term integration of migrants and refugees into society. This paper describes the job recommendation framework of the Integration of Migrants MatchER SErvice (IMMERSE). The proposed framework acts as a matching tool that enables the contexts of individual migrants and refugees, including their expectations, languages, educational background, previous job experience and skills, to be captured in the ontology and facilitate their matching with the job opportunities available in their host country. Profile information and job listings are processed in real time in the back-end, and matches are revealed in the front-end. Moreover, the matching tool considers the activity of the users on the platform to provide recommendations based on the similarity among existing jobs that they already showed interest in and new jobs posted on the platform. Finally, the framework takes into account the location of the users to rank the results and only shows the most relevant location-based recommendation

ADVANCED PERSONALIZATION OF LOCATION BASED SERVICES

This article explores possible solutions for improving Location Based Services (LBS). For the purpose of this paper context, user profile, previous choices and the choice profiles of similar users are aspects taken into consideration. A possible implementation of an LBS system, in the form of a public transport route finding application based on genetic algorithms is also presented. The proposed application uses semantic tagging to integrate data from multiple sources and sensors into a single interpretation.Knowledge Management, Geographic Information Systems, Location-based Services, Semantic Web

Choice of Metrics used in Collaborative Filtering and their Impact on Recommender Systems

The capacity of recommender systems to make correct predictions is essentially determined by the quality and suitability of the collaborative filtering that implements them. The common memory-based metrics are Pearson correlation and cosine, however, their use is not always the most appropriate or sufficiently justified. In this paper, we analyze these two metrics together with the less common mean squared difference (MSD) to discover their advantages and drawbacks in very important aspects such as the impact when introducing different values of k-neighborhoods, minimization of the MAE error, capacity to carry out a sufficient number of predictions, percentage of correct and incorrect predictions and behavior when attempting to recommend the n-best items. The paper lists the results and practical conclusions that have been obtained after carrying out a comparative study of the metrics based on 135 experiments on the MovieLens database of 100,000 ratios

Latitude, longitude, and beyond:mining mobile objects' behavior

Rapid advancements in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), and wireless communications, have resulted in a surge in data generation. Mobility data is one of the various forms of data, which are ubiquitously collected by different location sensing devices. Extensive knowledge about the behavior of humans and wildlife is buried in raw mobility data. This knowledge can be used for realizing numerous viable applications ranging from wildlife movement analysis, to various location-based recommendation systems, urban planning, and disaster relief. With respect to what mentioned above, in this thesis, we mainly focus on providing data analytics for understanding the behavior and interaction of mobile entities (humans and animals). To this end, the main research question to be addressed is: How can behaviors and interactions of mobile entities be determined from mobility data acquired by (mobile) wireless sensor nodes in an accurate and efficient manner? To answer the above-mentioned question, both application requirements and technological constraints are considered in this thesis. On the one hand, applications requirements call for accurate data analytics to uncover hidden information about individual behavior and social interaction of mobile entities, and to deal with the uncertainties in mobility data. Technological constraints, on the other hand, require these data analytics to be efficient in terms of their energy consumption and to have low memory footprint, and processing complexity

SKYPE: Top-k spatial-keyword publish/subscribe over sliding window

© 2016 VLDB Endowment 21508097/16/03. As the prevalence of social media and GPS-enabled devices, a massive amount of geo-textual data has been generated in a stream fashion, leading to a variety of applications such as location-based recommendation and information dissemination. In this paper, we investigate a novel real-time top-k monitoring problem over sliding window of streaming data; that is, we continuously maintain the top-k most relevant geo-textual messages (e.g., geo-tagged tweets) for a large number of spatial-keyword subscriptions (e.g., registered users interested in local events) simultaneously. To provide the most recent information under controllable memory cost, sliding window model is employed on the streaming geo-textual data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study top-k spatial-keyword publish/ subscribe over sliding window. A novel system, called Skype (Top-k Spatial-keyword Publish/Subscribe), is proposed in this paper. In Skype, to continuously maintain top-k results for massive subscriptions, we devise a novel indexing structure upon subscriptions such that each incoming message can be immediately delivered on its arrival. Moreover, to reduce the expensive top-k re-evaluation cost triggered by message expiration, we develop a novel cost-based k-skyband technique to reduce the number of re-evaluations in a costeffective way. Extensive experiments verify the great effciency and effectiveness of our proposed techniques

AP-Tree: Efficiently support continuous spatial-keyword queries over stream

© 2015 IEEE. We investigate the problem of processing a large amount of continuous spatial-keyword queries over streaming data, which is essential in many applications such as location-based recommendation and advertising, thanks to the proliferation of geo-equipped devices and the ensuing location-based social media applications. For example, a location-based e-coupon system may allow potentially millions of users to register their continuous spatial-keyword queries (e.g., interests in nearby sales) by specifying a set of keywords and a spatial region; the system then delivers each incoming spatial-textual object (e.g., a geo-tagged e-coupon) to all the matched queries (i.e., users) whose spatial and textual requirements are satisfied. While there are several prior approaches aiming at providing efficient query processing techniques for the problem, their approaches belong to spatial-first indexing method which cannot well exploit the keyword distribution. In addition, their textual filtering techniques are built upon simple variants of traditional inverted indexes, which do not perform well for the textual constraint imposed by the problem. In this paper, we address the above limitations and provide a highly efficient solution based on a novel adaptive index, named AP-Tree. The AP-Tree adaptively groups registered queries using keyword and spatial partitions, guided by a cost model. The AP-Tree also naturally indexes ordered keyword combinations. We present index construction algorithm that seamlessly and effectively integrates keyword and spatial partitions. Consequently, our method adapts well to the underlying spatial and keyword distributions of the data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that AP-Tree achieves up to an order of magnitude improvement on efficiency compared with prior state-of-the-art methods

Exploring Student Check-In Behavior for Improved Point-of-Interest Prediction

With the availability of vast amounts of user visitation history on location-based social networks (LBSN), the problem of Point-of-Interest (POI) prediction has been extensively studied. However, much of the research has been conducted solely on voluntary checkin datasets collected from social apps such as Foursquare or Yelp. While these data contain rich information about recreational activities (e.g., restaurants, nightlife, and entertainment), information about more prosaic aspects of people's lives is sparse. This not only limits our understanding of users' daily routines, but more importantly the modeling assumptions developed based on characteristics of recreation-based data may not be suitable for richer check-in data. In this work, we present an analysis of education "check-in" data using WiFi access logs collected at Purdue University. We propose a heterogeneous graph-based method to encode the correlations between users, POIs, and activities, and then jointly learn embeddings for the vertices. We evaluate our method compared to previous state-of-the-art POI prediction methods, and show that the assumptions made by previous methods significantly degrade performance on our data with dense(r) activity signals. We also show how our learned embeddings could be used to identify similar students (e.g., for friend suggestions).Comment: published in KDD'1