Personal Analytics to Enhance Smarter Commerce

Personal analytics refers to a recent trend where individuals wish to collect, analyze and visualize personal information so that they can gain knowledge about one’s behaviours, habits and thoughts in the context of their personal goals. The trend of self-tracking is rapidly increasing as people are becoming smarter about choices available to them, and seek awareness into the value of the actions they take and the purchases they make. While significant research effort is going into the research of ubiquitous tools to support the collection of personal data, a critical component of personal informatics tools is to support the integration, reflection and action phases of personal analytics: people need the ability to bring data together, to explore their data to understand their patterns, and to understand themselves in an objective way to devise plans of action. In this project, we aim to develop more advanced visualization and interaction techniques to present the data to the user so that they can make sense of their data, reflect on it and ultimately make more informed decisions within the context of smarter commerce initiatives at IBM.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey

Student:

Elena Voyloshnikova

Partner:

IBM Canada

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of Victoria