Abstract

Recommender systems are a special class of personalized systems that aim at predicting a user's interest on available products and services by relying on previously rated items or item features. Human factors associated with a user's personality or lifestyle, although potential determinants of user behavior, are rarely considered in the personalization process. In this paper we demonstrate how the concept of lifestyle can be incorporated in the recommendation process to improve the prediction accuracy by efficiently managing the problem of limited data availability. We propose two approaches: one relying on lifestyle alone and another integrating lifestyle within the nearest neighbor approach. Both approaches are empirically tested in the domain of recommendations for personalized television advertisements and are shown to outperform existing nearest neighborhood approaches in critical cases.

Short CV

George holds a PhD (2004) in Intelligent Interactive Media from the Department of Management Science and Technology, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Thessaloniki and M.Sc. in Software Engineering from the Queen Mary and Westfield College. He has worked as an adjunct Lecturer (407/80) in the Department of Management Science and Technology (AUEB) and in the Department of Technology Education and Digital Systems, University of Piraeus. He has been conducting research since 1999 at the ELTRUN research group at AUEB, working on several European R&D projects in the areas of retailing, mobile business, Digital TV and Cross-media service delivery, participating either as researcher or project manager. He has published more than 25 papers in international journals (such as User modelling and User Adapted Interaction, Interacting with Computers, Information Systems journal etc.) and international conferences. He is member of the steering committee of the EuroiTV initiative while he co-chaired the EuroiTV 2006 conference. Dr. Lekakos is currently a Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus.

Paper of PhD Thesis (Dr. Lekakos)