Natural Language Interaction in a Mobile Grocery Assistant
Date and time:
11/11/2009, 02:00pm
Location:
Building: 26, Room: 135, Clayton Campus
Presenters:
Dr Petteri Nurmi, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
Abstract:
Grocery shopping is one of the most fundamental everyday activities as
almost everyone shops for groceries on a regular and frequent basis. The fundamental nature of grocery shopping makes it a domain where mobile and pervasive technologies can potentially reach large audiences and have a significant impact, e.g., by facilitating planning activities or by freeing cognitive resources while the customer is inside the store. Recent years have seen numerous research prototypes as well as commercial deployments of shopping aids that utilize pervasive technologies. Existing solutions range from instrumented shopping carts to applications that run on a PDA or a mobile phone. A limitation of previous shopping assistants is that they rely on exact product information, whereas existing shopping practices are based on shopping lists that are expressed using colloquial natural language. As part of our current work we are constructing Ma$$iv€, an intelligent grocery assistant for mobile devices. In Ma$$iv€ users express their needs using natural language shopping list entries and information retrieval techniques are used to map the user inputs into potential products in the store. In this talk we introduce the underlying information retrieval techniques that we have developed and we describe a technique we have developed for making grocery product recommendations based on the user’s shopping list entries.
Speaker biographies:
Dr. Petteri Nurmi is a post-doctoral researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Dr. Nurmi’s research interests span pervasive and ubiquitous computing, mobile human-computer interaction, user modeling and personalization, and information retrieval and he has published over 30 scientific articles. Dr. Nurmi works in the Adaptive Computing research group, headed by Dr. Patrik Floréen, where he is the leading researcher for activities related to mobile and ubiquitous computing. He is the workshop co-chair for the upcoming Pervasive 2010 conference and he has served as a reviewer for numerous journals and top-tier conferences, including Pervasive, Ubicomp and CHI.
