Prof. Panos K. Chrysanthis was a guest speaker at the Software Seminar of the University of Michigan's Computer Science Department on December 19, 2016. He discussed the issue of Data-driven Serendipity Navigation in Urban Places.

Abstract:
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.