University of Minnesota Campus Event Finder Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota Presented by Murat Demiray & Mustafa Karamavus

Outline Motivation Problem Statement Related Works Challenges Solution Validation Conclusion & Future Work Questions

Motivation Emergence of Location Based Services – Different applications areas Requesting the nearest business or service Location sensitive transactions and alerts Turn by turn navigation to any address – Make things easier More meaningful queries with location information User friendly representation interface based on maps

Motivation (Cont.) U of M Events Page provides limited functionalities

Problem Statement Input: – A list of events on the campus and user queries Output: – Query results represented on a map Objective – For a given user query, finding and representing campus events based on filters such as event time, date, category and location – Visualization Constraints / Limitations – Google Map Location accuracy, distance accuracy Directions

Related Works

Related Works (Cont.)

Challenges Accuracy – Location – Distance Data source – might be inaccurate – limited resources – different data format Data representation – map APIs allow limited functions – user friendly interface

Solution A Web Application : U of M Event finder Platforms & Technologies: – Visual Studio.NET 2008 – Asp. Net – Google API – PostGIS

Solution (Cont.) Event data entry to database - from university event page XDocument rssFeed = XDocument.Load(" var posts = from item in rssFeed.Descendants("item") select new { title = item.Element(eventNamespace + "title").Value, location = item.Element(eventNamespace + "location").Value, startdate = item.Element(eventNamespace + "startDate").Value, enddate = item.Element(eventNamespace + "endDate").Value, starttime = item.Element(eventNamespace + "startTime").Value, endtime = item.Element(eventNamespace + "endTime").Value, link = item.Element("link").Value, moreinfo = item.Element(eventNamespace + "moreinfo").Value, };" - user entry

Solution (Cont.) User search with filters: – date: day and days (interval) – time: interval – location: point and range – category – combinations of these Representation of the results – representation on the map cartography – textual representation

Demo

Validation & Results Experiment with U of M event data – findings: Pros: – Results are successfully retrieved according to user search filter(s) – Validation of visualization of results Cons: – U of M event page data might be inaccurate – In some cases, Google Map API can’t find locations from U of M event location data – Distance calculation is not precise – Directions might be unrealistic

Conclusion & Future Work A web application which allows people to do a variety of searches about the events on the U of M Twin Cities campus with the objective of increase the number of attendance to the events Future work: – RSS from different sources ( SUA events, Bookstore events, Gopher sports ) – Increasing accuracy in nearest search – Different map APIs: Microsoft, Yahoo, ESRI – Location based recommendations Profile based: Favorite locations, categories and etc. History based: history of the locations where user attended to the events

Question for the class: What kind of searches (filters) are users able to do in U of M Even Finder? What other filter(s) can be added?

Questions?