A Location- and Diversity-Aware News Feed System for Mobile Users
Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews › RGC 21 - Publication in refereed journal › peer-review
Author(s)
Related Research Unit(s)
Detail(s)
Original language | English |
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Article number | 7111349 |
Pages (from-to) | 846-861 |
Journal / Publication | IEEE Transactions on Services Computing |
Volume | 9 |
Issue number | 6 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2016 |
Link(s)
Abstract
A location-aware news feed (LANF) system generates news feeds for a mobile user based on her spatial preference (i.e., her current location and future locations) and non-spatial preference (i.e., her interest). Existing LANF systems simply send the most relevant geo-tagged messages to their users. Unfortunately, the major limitation of such an existing approach is that, a news feed may contain messages related to the same location (i.e., point-of-interest) or the same category of locations (e.g., food, entertainment or sport). We argue that diversity is a very important feature for location-aware news feeds because it helps users discover new places and activities. In this paper, we propose D-MobiFeed; a new LANF system enables a user to specify the minimum number of message categories (h) for the messages in a news feed. In D-MobiFeed, our objective is to efficiently schedule news feeds for a mobile user at her current and predicted locations, such that (i) each news feed contains messages belonging to at least h different categories, and (ii) their total relevance to the user is maximized. To achieve this objective, we formulate the problem into two parts, namely, a decision problem and an optimization problem. For the decision problem, we provide an exact solution by modeling it as a maximum flow problem and proving its correctness. The optimization problem is solved by our proposed three-stage heuristic algorithm. We conduct a user study and experiments to evaluate the performance of D-MobiFeed using a real data set crawled from Foursquare. Experimental results show that our proposed three-stage heuristic scheduling algorithm outperforms the brute-force optimal algorithm by at least an order of magnitude in terms of running time and the relative error incurred by the heuristic algorithm is below 1 percent. D-MobiFeed with the location prediction method effectively improves the relevance, diversity, and efficiency of news feeds.
Research Area(s)
- diversity constraint, Location-aware news feeds, location-based services, online scheduling, user mobility
Citation Format(s)
A Location- and Diversity-Aware News Feed System for Mobile Users. / Xu, Wenjian; Chow, Chi-Yin.
In: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Vol. 9, No. 6, 7111349, 01.11.2016, p. 846-861.
In: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Vol. 9, No. 6, 7111349, 01.11.2016, p. 846-861.
Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews › RGC 21 - Publication in refereed journal › peer-review