User Profiling through NFC interactions: Mining NFC-based User Information from Mobile Devices and Back-end Systems

With the myriad of information resources available on the Web, personalization has become important to facilitate information retrieval and recommender systems that provide information and services adapted to the user’s needs. A crucial component in any personalization approach is the availability of a user profile that reflects the user’s interests, behaviour and intention. In this paper we exploit the fact that for many people the mobile phone is a close companion that follows the person everywhere and is used for many dif- ferent tasks in the person’s daily life. In particular, we focus on mining user activities on NFC-based services to collect information that can be included in a user profile. The paper describes the process of mining usage information from multiple NFC-based applications, both on a smart phone and on back-end systems. We also describe our experiments that lead to and support mining of NFC-based user information.