A survey of context-aware mobile recommendations

Mobile recommender systems target on recommending the right product or information to the right mobile users at anytime and anywhere. It is well known that the contextual information is often the key for the performances of mobile recommendations. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a focused survey of the recent development of context-aware mobile recommendations. After briefly reviewing the state-of-the-art of recommender systems, we first discuss the general notion of mobile context and how the contextual information is collected. Then, we introduce the existing approaches to exploit contextual information for modeling mobile recommendations. Furthermore, we summarize several existing recommendation tasks in the mobile scenarios, such as the recommendations in the tourism domain. Finally, we discuss some key issues that are still critical in the field of context-aware mobile recommendations, including the privacy problem, the energy efficiency issues, and the design of user interfaces.