Systems Seminar - CSE

Data-driven Serendipity Navigation in Urban Places

Panos K. ChrysanthisProfessorUniversity of Pittsburgh
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With the proliferation of mobile computing and the ability to collect detailed data for the urban environment a number of systems that aim at providing Points of Interest (POIs) and tour recommendations have appeared. The overwhelming majority of these systems aims at providing an optimal recommendation, where optimality refers to an objective such as minimizing the distance to be covered, maximizing the quality of the POIs recommended etc. Nevertheless, the problem with focusing on these objectives is that little room is left to the user for serendipity. Urban and social scientists have identified serendipity, i.e., the ability to come across unexpected places, as a feature that makes a city livable. In this talk, I will present Mobile Personal Guide (MPG), our tour recommendation system, which integrates the notion of serendipity in urban navigation through the ideas of preferential diversity and random walk, without however compromising the quality the recommended POIs.
Panos K. Chrysanthi is a Professor of Computer Science and a founder and director of the Advanced Data Management Technologies Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also an adjunct Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University and University of Cyprus. His research interests lie within the areas of data management (Big Data, Databases, Data Streams & Sensor networks), distributed & mobile computing, workflow management, operating systems and real-time systems. In 1995, he was a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award for his investigation on the management of data for mobile and wireless computing and in 2015, he received the University of Pittsburgh's Provost Award for Excellence in Mentoring (doctoral students). His currently an associate editor of IEEE TKDE and DAPD and PC Co-Chair of IEEE ICDE 2018. Chrysanthis is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a Senior Member of IEEE. He received his BS degree (Physics with concentration in Computer Science) from the University of Athens, Greece. He earned his MS and PhD degrees (Computer and Information Sciences) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

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