Interactive route personalization using regions of interest

There is an abundance of services and applications that find the most efficient route between two places, people are not always interested in efficiency; sometimes we just want a pleasant route. Such routes are subjective though, and may depend on contextual factors that route planners are oblivious to. One possible solution is to automatically learn what a user wants, but this requires behavioral data, leading to a cold start problem. An alternative approach is to let the user express their desires explicitly, effectively helping them create the most pleasant route themselves. In this paper we provide a proof of concept of a client-side route planner that does exactly that. We aggregated the Point of Interest information from OpenStreetMap into Regions of Interest, and published the results on the Web. These regions are described semantically, enabling the route planner to align the user’s input to what is known about their environment. Planning a 3 km long pedestrian route through a city center takes 5 s, but subsequent adjustments to the route require less than a second to compute. These execution times imply that our approach is feasible, although further optimizations are needed to bring this to the general public

Improving User Experience by Browser Extensions: A New Role of Public Service Media?

The paper questions the role of public service media in the digital era. The Internet has in fact disrupted previous patterns of production, distribution and consumption of information. Concerns arose on social media effects on well-being and how mainstream platforms design affects information consumption. The paper is an interdisciplinary contribution structured as follows. Firstly, it critically analyses the risks resulting from social media’s usage, with a special focus on personalization practices. Then, it explores the development of Public Service Broadcasting and questions the role that Public Service Media (PSM) has to sustain media quality, information diversity and, more generally, its traditional values. Thus, arguments in favor of a renovated and proactive role of Public Service Media are provided. In particular, an agonistic approach to social media, an ‘architecture for serendipity’ and the role of attention management are advocated. Finally, drawing from information architecture and nudging theory, the paper introduces the concept of ‘meta-design’ as the ability to re-shape a digital environment by browser extensions in order to change design choices as well as to inform and educate users. The conclusion is that improving user experience by meta-design can actually represent a novel experimental role for PSM and, eventually, a soft regulatory tool for sustaining individuals and the general public interest