Eliciting Users' Attitudes toward Smart Devices

This paper presents a study to determine users' attitudes toward smart devices. We conducted a web survey to elicit users' ratings for devices and combinations of tasks and devices; the results of this survey led to the development of a Recommender System (RS) for smart devices for particular tasks. We investigated user- and item-based Collaborative Filters, and compared their performance with that of global and demographic RS baselines. We then developed a technique based on Principal Components Analysis to select a subset of the original survey questions that supports the prediction of users' ratings for device-task combinations. Our results show that the accuracy of an RS that asks only a small subset of the survey questions is similar to that of an RS that predicts users' answers to one survey question on the basis of their answers to all the other questions.