Geo Search
Wednesday, 2:00–3:30 PM
Chair: Utku Irmak
Collaborative Location and Activity Recommendations with GPS History Data
Vincent W. Zheng, Yu Zheng, Xing Xie, Qiang Yang
With the increasing popularity of location-based services, such as tour guide and location-based social network, we now have accumulated many location data on the Web. In this paper, we show that, by using the location data based on GPS and users’ comments at various locations, we can discover interesting locations and possible activities that can be performed there for recommendations. Our research is highlighted in the following location-related queries in our daily life: 1) if we want to do something such as sightseeing or food-hunting in a large city such as Beijing, where should we go? 2) If we have already visited some places such as the Bird’s Nest building in Beijing’s Olympic park, what else can we do there? By using our system, for the first question, we can recommend her to visit a list of interesting locations such as Tiananmen Square, Bird’s Nest, etc. For the second question, if the user visits Bird’s Nest, we can recommend her to not only do sightseeing but also to experience its outdoor exercise facilities or try some nice food nearby. To achieve this goal, we first model the users’ location and activity histories that we take as input. We then mine knowledge, such as the location features and activity-activity correlations from the geographical databases and the Web, to gather additional inputs. Finally, we apply a collective matrix factorization method to mine interesting locations and activities, and use them to recommend to the users where they can visit if they want to perform some specific activities and what they can do if they visit some specific places. We empirically evaluated our system using a large GPS dataset collected by 162 users over a period of 2.5 years in the real-world. We extensively evaluated our system and showed that our system can outperform several state-of-the-art baselines.
Find Me If You Can: Improving Geographical Prediction with Social and Spatial Proximity
Lars Backstrom, Eric Sun, Cameron Marlow
Geography and social relationships are inextricably intertwined; the people we interact with on a daily basis almost always live near us. As people spend more time online, data regarding these two dimensions—geography and social relationships—are becoming increasingly precise, allowing us to build reliable models to describe their interaction. These models have important implications in the design of location-based services, security intrusion detection, and social media supporting local communities. Using user-supplied address data and the network of associations between members of the Facebook social network, we can directly observe and measure the relationship be- tween geography and friendship. Using these measurements, we introduce an algorithm that predicts the location of an individual from a sparse set of located users with performance that exceeds IP-based geolocation. This algorithm is efficient and scalable, and could be run on hundreds of millions of users.
Equip Tourists with Knowledge Mined from Travelogues
Qiang Hao, Rui Cai, Changhu Wang, Lei Zhang
With the prosperity of tourism and the Web 2.0 technologies, more and more people have willingness to share their travel experiences on the Web (e.g., weblogs, forums, or Web 2.0 communities). These so-called travelogues contain rich information, particularly including location-representative knowledge such as attractions (e.g., Golden Gate Bridge), styles (e.g., beach, history), and activities (e.g., diving, surfing). The location-representative information in travelogues can greatly facilitate other tourists’ trip planning, if it can be correctly extracted and summarized. However, since most travelogues are unstructured and contain much noise, it is difficult for common users to digest utilize such knowledge effectively. In this paper, to mine location-representative knowledge from a large collection of travelogues, we propose a probabilistic generative model, named as Location-Topic model. This model has the advantages of (1) differentiability between two kinds of topics, i.e., local topics which characterize locations and global topics which represent other common themes shared by different locations, and (2) representation of locations in the local topic space to encode both location-representative knowledge and similarities between various locations. Some novel applications are developed based on the proposed model, including (1) destination recommendation based on flexible queries, (2) characteristic summarization for a given destination with representative tags and snippets, and (3) identification of informative parts of a travelogue and enriching such highlights with related images. Based on a large collection of travelogues, the proposed framework is evaluated using both objective and subjective evaluation methods and shows promising results.
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