MatPlanner: Plan Your Days in Conferences by Resolving Conflicting Events

Saemi Choi, Onkar Krishna, Wen-Yu Lee, Kiyoharu Aizawa

Abstract: Nowadays multi-track conferences impose great difficulty to attendees in making a day plan of attending relevant sessions/papers, because a large number of sessions are scheduled on a single day and many of them are at the same time. To address this problem, we introduce MatPlanner, a mobile application, which provides an alternate way of scheduling a day in a conference by understanding the attendee's interest and preferences. MatPlanner learns event-topic interest matrix from few sampled events selected by each user and then recommend relevant events and display the final output. More importantly, MatPlanner's interface enables users to resolve conflicting events by showing them at the same panel which makes it easy to compare. Interview results suggested a high level of satisfaction among participants in scheduling a day.