User Interaction With a Personalized Mobile Recommender of Leisure Activities
Kurt Partridge and 
Ellen Isaacs , PARC
Kurt.Partridge
parc.com, Ellen.Isaacsparc.com
Seminar on People, Computers,
and Design
Stanford University February 8, 2008
How do you decide where to go for fun? In this talk, we will discuss a mobile system that helps people discover places to go during their leisure time by recommending nearby venues such as restaurants, shops, museums, events, and parks. This system, codenamed Magitti, personalizes its recommendations by combining explicit general preferences, collaborative filtering, and predictions of your current activity and interests from past behavior. We will give an overview of the initial fieldwork, system design, and user evaluation, and present a demonstration of the system.
Kurt Partridge is a researcher in the Ubiquitous Computing Area in the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His research spans a variety of areas, including context awareness, activity modeling, location modeling, mobile device interaction, and wearable computing. He is particularly interested in systems and devices that blend naturally with people's everyday activities. Kurt received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2005.
Ellen Isaacs is an interaction designer and researcher in the Socio-Technical and Interaction Research group at Palo Alto Research Center. During her career, Ellen has moved between design, evaluation, research, and management at a variety of Silicon Valley companies, including Sun Microsystems, Electric Communities, Excite, AT&T Labs, and most recently, Izix Consulting, her own interaction design consulting firm. Her research interests have focused primarily on systems that support collaboration and communication through a variety of media. She is the co-author with Alan Walendowski of "Designing From Both Sides of the Screen," a book about the process of interaction design and the collaboration between interaction designers and software engineers. Ellen is also an accomplished photographer who sells her images professionally. She received her PhD in psycholinguistics from Stanford University.
View this talk on line at CS547 on Stanford OnLine or using this video link.
Titles and abstracts for previous years are available by year and by speaker.