@conference {47, title = {Helping Tourists to Plan Activities with Shared Urban Social Context}, booktitle = {Smart Sociable City Workshop, 9th IEEE Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Environments}, year = {2013}, publisher = {IOS Press}, organization = {IOS Press}, address = {Athens, Greece}, abstract = {Ubiquitously available map-based services for tourism are becoming a norm, with the spread of smartphones and the integration of pervasive displays in the urban infrastructure. At the same time, interactions with the urban environment through social networks is rife, with actions such as tagging locations and checking-in to these now a part of mainstream mobile social network use. In this paper, we discuss how exploiting mined interactions with the urban environment can help tourists better plan activities, through sharing the collectively generated social context of a smart, connected city, as a background layer to mapped POIs.}, keywords = {Social context, tourism, ubiquitous maps}, doi = {10.3233/978-1-61499-286-8-663}, url = {http://ebooks.iospress.nl/publication/33922}, author = {Andreas Komninos and Barrie, Peter and Jeries Besharat} } @conference {komninos2013hotcity, title = {HotCity: enhancing ubiquitous maps with social context heatmaps}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia}, year = {2013}, pages = {52}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Lulea, Sweden}, abstract = {In this paper we present HotCity, a service that demonstrates how collecting and mining the interactions that users make with the urban environment through social networks, can help tourists better plan activities, through sharing the collectively generated social context of a smart, connected city, as a background layer to mapped POI. The data for our service stems from the collection and analysis of 1-month worth of collected human-physical environment interactions (i.e., Foursquare check-ins) data for Oulu, a medium-sized city in Finland, where our service is deployed in ubiquitous public displays. Our analysis demonstrates that a good model of the city{\textquoteright}s dynamics can be built despite the low popularity of Foursquare amongst locals. Our findings from the field-based trial of the HotCity service yield several useful insights and important contributions. We found that the method of using a heatmap as an intermediate layer of environmental context does not negatively affect the experience of users at the cognitive level, compared with a more traditional map and POI type of interface, where temporal aspects of context are not present. In the concluding sections, we discuss how this cloud-based service can also be used in a variety of ubiquitous computing platforms.}, keywords = {heatmap visualization, Social context, ubiquitous maps}, doi = {10.1145/2541831.2543694}, author = {Andreas Komninos and Jeries Besharat and Ferreira, Denzil and John Garofalakis} }