User profiling for personalized recommendation and user categorization

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The proposed research is in the area of social network and data analytics, and should have an impact in Canadian ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sector. EatSleepRIDE.com (ESR) is an online social networking platform for motorcycle riders. Users join the community, post/share their stories, news, photos, reviews, etc. and read as well as give comments to others' posts. There are two specific problems this project is intended to solve. One is the information overload problem. Only the hot and latest posts appear in the front page. It is not very easy for users to find other posts they might like. ESR wants to find a solution to recommend the posts to their users. A second problem is how to generate actionable and valuable insights from the ESR community for third parties to facilitate targeted advertising or the marketing for individuals as well as user groups. In this project, we propose to apply the user modeling technique to build enriched user profiles with information from multiple sources, including the user-provided information during registration, users' social network activities (posts, likes, comments, follows), users' riding histories, etc. Using the generated user profiles, we could build the personalized recommender system to provide the relevant and quality information to ESR users, which can solve the above-mentioned first problem. To solve the second problem, we could categorize users based on their profiles into pre-defined groups (e.g. new vs. experienced riders) or self-organized groups (i.e. similar users in a group), which could help generate revenue for ESR from more targeted advertisements. The proposed project will benefit Canada's tourism sector by matching riders with tourism destination. It will also benefit the motor-rider community by offering a more personalized social platform for easier information sharing between community members, and improved online and potentially riding experiences for riders. It could help ESR and other third parties launch more targeted marketing campaigns, which will bring economic benefits to related Canadian companies and tourism operators.