The Beacon Südtirol – Alto Adige project (https://beacon.bz.it/project/) is developing a hardware and software Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure for South Tyrol Province. The project is currently deploying 3.500 beacons, small Bluetooth devices that, by providing a unique identifier, enable the development of mobile applications which can offer localized and contextual services. The developed infrastructure, which will be available as open source, can be used to develop added value services for the region. Within this context, Suggesto, in collaboration with IDM Südtirol – Alto Adige, NOI Techpark and the Computer Science Faculty of Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, is extending the South Tyrol Mobile Guide official app to provide to the users contextual information and personalized recommendations for point of interests to visit or activities to practice (https://beacon.bz.it/wp-6/beaconrecommender/). Beacons enable the application to precisely localize the user both indoor and outdoor. Users in proximity of a point of interest (POI) can receive information about the POI or suggestions for other nearby POIs to visit. Innovative recommendation algorithms exploit the user’s observed behavior and position to compute personalized suggestions for relevant point of interests. The app is now under evaluation on some selected case studies. During the talk, we will present the scenarios which are supported, their implications and possible extensions; we will provide an overview of the implemented recommendation algorithms and illustrate the software architecture which has been designed to integrate the beacon technologies and the recommendation algorithm in the existing architecture. We will also present the first results of the user evaluations on the selected case studies.

1. B e a c o n d e t e c t i o n s a n d p e r s o n a l i z e d
r e c o m m e n d a t i o n s
The Beacon South Tyrol Mobile Guide
Adriano Venturini
adrianoventurini@suggesto.it
Dario Cavada
dariocavada@suggesto.it
https://www.suggesto.eu/
SFSCON 2019, Bozen, 15-16/11/2019

2. South Tyrol Beacon Guide App
SFSCON 2019, Bozen, 15-16/11/2019
• Project partners:
•Prototype extensions of the South
Tyrol App:
• Personalized suggestions on things to
do.
• User localization and push notification
through beacon detection

3. What is a Beacon
• A small Bluetooth radio transmitter
• Transmits a unique ID which can be used to:
• Detect a position
• Detect proximity to a point of interest
• Can transmit additional information:
• Provide specific information about an object
• Temperature
• Accelerometer data
• URL
• Short range (0-100 m)
• Enables the implementation of context dependent scenarios,
via mobile apps or bluetooth enabled devices.

4. 3.500 beacons in South Tyrol

5. Beacon notification
5

6. Architecture
6
POI
API
Open Data Hub
App
Beacon Detection
Recommendations
Beacon
Beacon
API
Logging System
Tips API
Log
<Elastic Search>
Analysis
<Kibana>
Recommender System
Beacon SDK
Amazon
AWS

7. 3. BeaconId, lat - lon
4. Lat,lon 6. POI
South Tyrol Beacon
Guide App
Open Data Hub
Beacon Notification Architecture
Beacon
1. detect
2. Beacon info 5. search(lat, lon)
Beacon API POI API
beacon-sdk
Beacon Detection
<foreground service>
POI Selection
POI
notification

8. Personalized suggestions
Support tourists in finding
places of interests (POIs)
Huge variety of different
POIs
Understanding User
preferences in Context
SUNNY
AFTERNOON
COFFEE BAR
Adapting recommendation
to user group behaviour

9. 9
SUNNY
AFTERNOON
GARDEN
SUNNY
AFTERNOON
SUNNY
AFTERNOON
MUSEUM

10. Recommender System
architecture
Model
Repository
DB
Query 3rd PArty
API
Data Ingest
Process Data
ML Model
Training
Machine Learning
ML Model
Serving
Recommender System
LoadBalancer
RESTAPI
RequestAnalyzer
UserProfileBuilder
Recommendations
(*) POIs Visit Trajectories for Next-POI Recommendation, Proceedings of the International
Conference in Nicosia, Cyprus, January 30–February 1, 2019, David Massimo and Francesco Ricci

11. 11
Log tracking and usage
Amazon AWS
App
Logging
FireroseLOG API
<lambda function>
INDEXER
<lambda function>
Firerhose Bucket S3 Elastic Search
Console
<Kibana>

12. Data analysis (Kibana Console)
12

13. First evaluation and found issues
• Issues in background mode with different Android versions.
Android 9 is more restrictive on:
• notifications
• power management
• When the app is in standby, it is necessary to change default
power management settings
• Android hints the user on power consumption on the
foreground service

14. Next steps
• Next version of the recommender:
• Collect users’ data for the recommender
• Extend the recommender system with new algorithms which consider the
history of items visited by the user (see David’s presentation)
• Beacon:
• Give to the users more control on notifications and on power management
• Deal with itineraries

15. B e a c o n d e t e c t i o n s a n d p e r s o n a l i z e d
r e c o m m e n d a t i o n s
The Beacon South Tyrol Mobile Guide
Adriano Venturini
adrianoventurini@suggesto.it
Dario Cavada
'dariocavada@suggesto.it'
https://www.suggesto.eu/
SFSCON 2019, Bozen, 15-16/11/2019