ACM HotMobile 2013 poster: the importance of timing in mobile personalization

With the increased prevalence of smart mobile devices and applications, understanding what is important to a mobile user at a point in time is an area of increasing focus. Many current applications have approached this problem by trying to tailor the user experience by using various aspects known about the user’s location as the user context. The next step in personalization is determining what is of interest to the user beyond just the user’s immediate situation. A number of studies have tried to address this issue from the perspective of predicting the next location based on prior travel history [1]. In this work, we examine the question of what may be relevant based on what future events a user will be planning beyond just the next activity. To explore this we address two key questions: 1) when are plans made about a particular type of activity; 2) how do the different aspects of these plans get finalized.