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Master Thesis: Food and Sustainability Recommendation Systems in E-commerce Systems
You will continue the development of a browser plugin that recommends alternative -- healthier and more sustainable -- food items to online shoppers, and lead a study to assess the impact of that software on shoppers' behavior.
Keywords: E-commerce, nutrition, food, recommender systems, World Wide Web
E-commerce applications both in the B2B and the B2C space have a large incentive to create silos and thereby avoid losing customers to alternative suppliers with equivalent or similar offerings. Several attempts have been made to break these silos, most prominently in the domain of price-comparison applications that aggregate offerings by different applications and rank them according to user preferences. However, these systems only consider the price and neglect other relevant aspects of e-commerce offerings. They also usually involve manual effort to crawl and index service offerings by different suppliers and do not expose the discovered information in a way that can easily be read by machines. Finally, traditional price-comparison applications need to be explicitly and consciously used by shoppers instead of accessing the target application (e.g., the Amazon website) directly, which incurs an inconvenience on the shopping experience. In our research, we are attempting to find ways to overcome these limitations and apply our findings in the food domain, to find a way to enable online shoppers to make better (food) buying decisions across suppliers with as little explicit intervention as possible.
You have
- ...basic programming experience (or sufficient motivation to acquire this experience as part of the project)
- ...an interest in analyzing online shoppers' behavior
- ...a desire to use ICT for improving human decisions
- ...a motivation to participate in current research projects
E-commerce applications both in the B2B and the B2C space have a large incentive to create silos and thereby avoid losing customers to alternative suppliers with equivalent or similar offerings. Several attempts have been made to break these silos, most prominently in the domain of price-comparison applications that aggregate offerings by different applications and rank them according to user preferences. However, these systems only consider the price and neglect other relevant aspects of e-commerce offerings. They also usually involve manual effort to crawl and index service offerings by different suppliers and do not expose the discovered information in a way that can easily be read by machines. Finally, traditional price-comparison applications need to be explicitly and consciously used by shoppers instead of accessing the target application (e.g., the Amazon website) directly, which incurs an inconvenience on the shopping experience. In our research, we are attempting to find ways to overcome these limitations and apply our findings in the food domain, to find a way to enable online shoppers to make better (food) buying decisions across suppliers with as little explicit intervention as possible.
You have - ...basic programming experience (or sufficient motivation to acquire this experience as part of the project) - ...an interest in analyzing online shoppers' behavior - ...a desire to use ICT for improving human decisions - ...a motivation to participate in current research projects
As part of this thesis, you will continue the development of a browser plugin that recommends alternative -- healthier -- food items to online shoppers, and lead a study to assess the impact of that software on shoppers' behavior. Your task will be to design that study, build extensions to the software application, conduct the study, and evaluate the results. As part of this project, you have the chance to become a co-author of a scientific paper in a top conference or journal.
As part of this thesis, you will continue the development of a browser plugin that recommends alternative -- healthier -- food items to online shoppers, and lead a study to assess the impact of that software on shoppers' behavior. Your task will be to design that study, build extensions to the software application, conduct the study, and evaluate the results. As part of this project, you have the chance to become a co-author of a scientific paper in a top conference or journal.
Klaus Fuchs (klaus.fuchs@autoidlabs.ch) and (simon.mayer@autoidlabs.ch)
Klaus Fuchs (klaus.fuchs@autoidlabs.ch) and (simon.mayer@autoidlabs.ch)