Biblio
Researchers and industry experts are looking at how to improve a shopper's experience and a store's revenue by leveraging and integrating technologies at the edges of the network, such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, cloud-based systems, and mobile applications. The integration of IoT technology can now be used to improve purchasing incentives through the use of electronic coupons. Research has shown that targeted electronic coupons are the most effective and coupons presented to the shopper when they are near the products capture the most shoppers' dollars. Although it is easy to imagine coupons being broadcast to a shopper's mobile device over a low-power wireless channel, such a solution must be able to advertise many products, target many individual shoppers, and at the same time, provide shoppers with their desired level of privacy. To support this type of IoT-enabled shopping experience, we have designed Aggio, an electronic coupon distribution system that enables the distribution of localized, targeted coupons while supporting user privacy and security. Aggio uses cryptographic mechanisms to not only provide security but also to manage shopper groups e.g., bronze, silver, and gold reward programs) and minimize resource usage, including bandwidth and energy. The novel use of cryptographic management of coupons and groups allows Aggio to reduce bandwidth use, as well as reduce the computing and energy resources needed to process incoming coupons. Through the use of local coupon storage on the shopper's mobile device, the shopper does not need to query the cloud and so does not need to expose all of the details of their shopping decisions. Finally, the use of privacy preserving communication between the shopper's mobile device and the CouponHubs that are distributed throughout the retail environment allows the shopper to expose their location to the store without divulging their location to all other shoppers present in the store.
An increasing number of people are using online social networking services (SNSs), and a significant amount of information related to experiences in consumption is shared in this new media form. Text mining is an emerging technique for mining useful information from the web. We aim at discovering in particular tweets semantic patterns in consumers' discussions on social media. Specifically, the purposes of this study are twofold: 1) finding similarity and dissimilarity between two sets of textual documents that include consumers' sentiment polarities, two forms of positive vs. negative opinions and 2) driving actual content from the textual data that has a semantic trend. The considered tweets include consumers' opinions on US retail companies (e.g., Amazon, Walmart). Cosine similarity and K-means clustering methods are used to achieve the former goal, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a popular topic modeling algorithm, is used for the latter purpose. This is the first study which discover semantic properties of textual data in consumption context beyond sentiment analysis. In addition to major findings, we apply LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocations) to the same data and drew latent topics that represent consumers' positive opinions and negative opinions on social media.