Competitive gamification in crowdsourcing-based contextual-aware recommender systems.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, crowdsourcing-based context-aware recommender systems (CARS) which capture the real-time context in a contactless manner played an important role in the "new normal". This study investigates whether this approach effectively supports users' decisions during epidemics and how different game designs affect users performing crowdsourcing tasks. This study developed a crowdsourcing-based CARS focusing on restaurant recommendations. We used four conditions (control, self-competitive, social-competitive, and mixed gamification) and conducted a two-week field study involving 68 users. The system provided recommendations based on real-time contexts including restaurants' epidemic status, allowing users to identify suitable restaurants to visit during COVID-19. The result demonstrates the feasibility of crowdsourcing to collect real-time information for recommendations during COVID-19 and reveals that a mixed competitive game design encourages both high- and low-performance users to engage more and that a game design with self-competitive elements motivates users to take on a wider variety of tasks. These findings inform the design of restaurant recommender systems in an epidemic context and serve as a comparison of incentive mechanisms for gamification of self-competition and competition with others.

Real-Time Context-Aware Recommendation System for Tourism.

Recently, the tourism trend has been shifting towards the Tourism 2.0 paradigm due to increased travel experiences and the increase in acquiring and sharing information through the Internet. The Tourism 2.0 paradigm requires developing intelligent tourism service tools for positive effects such as time savings and marketing utilization. Existing tourism service tools recommend tourist destinations based on the relationship between tourists and tourist destinations or tourism patterns, so it is difficult to make recommendations in situations where information is insufficient or changes in real time. In this paper, we propose a real-time recommendation system for tourism (R2Tour) that responds to changing situations in real time, such as external factors and distance information, and recommends customized tourist destinations according to the type of tourist. R2Tour trains a machine learning model with situational information such as temperature and precipitation and tourist profiles such as gender and age to recommend the top five nearby tourist destinations. To verify the recommendation performance of R2Tour, six machine learning models, including K-NN and SVM, and information on tourist attractions in Jeju Island were used. As a result of the experiment, R2Tour was verified with accuracy of 77.3%, micro-F1 0.773, and macro-F1 0.415. Since R2Tour trains tourism patterns based on situational information, it is possible to recommend new tourist destinations and respond to changing situations in real time. In the future, R2Tour can be installed in vehicles to recommend nearby tourist destinations or expanded to tasks in the tourism industry, such as a smart target advertising system.