RecSys for distributed events: investigating the influence of recommendations on visitor plans

Richard Schaller, Morgan Harvey, David Elsweiler

Abstract: Distributed events are collections of events taking place within a small area over the same time period and relating to a single topic. There are often a large number of events on offer and the times in which they can be visited are heavily constrained, therefore the task of choosing events to visit and in which order can be very difficult. In this work we investigate how visitors can be assisted by means of a recommender system via 2 large-scale naturalistic studies (n=860 and n=1047). We show that a recommender system can influence users to select events that result in tighter and more compact routes, thus allowing users to spend less time travelling and more time visiting events.