Together with the company Blanc Noir the Know-Center developed a recommender system for the use in both, online and offline marketplaces. While in online marketplaces (e.g., product web shops) a user solely interacts through a virtual environment, in offline marketplaces (e.g., shopping mall) the user physically interacts with the store. The core of the project was to recognize the different activity patterns a user does in a virtual environment (searches through products, liking a Facebook page, etc.) and physical environments (e.g., walks through the shopping mall, dwells in front of a specific store, etc.) and to combine those. In order to achieve the goals, the project has focused on incorporating physical environments (e.g., shopping malls into the loop) by using IPS beacon technology. As such, physical interactions can be tracked in the real world and be leveraged for creating recommendations in the virtual. The other way around also applies, as a user’s online behaviour can mapped and leveraged in the physical world, too.

---

Findings of the project were accepted at RecSys'2015

---