Detecting Event Visits in Urban Areas via Smartphone GPS Data

In geographic search tasks, where the location of the user is an important part of the task context, knowing whether or not a user has visited a location associated with a returned result could be a useful indicator of system performance. In this paper we derive and evaluate a model to estimate, based on user interaction logs, GPS information and event meta-data, the events that were visited by users of a mobile search system for an annual cultural evening where multiple events were organised across the city of Munich. Using a training / testing set derived from 111 users, our model is able to achieve high levels of accuracy, which will, in future work, allow us to explore how different ways of using the system lead to different outcomes for users.