myDeal: a mobile shopping assistant matching user preferences to promotions.

A common problem in large urban cities is the huge number of retail options available. In response, a number of shopping assistance applications have been created for mobile phones. However, these applications mostly allow users to know where stores are or find promotions on specific items. What is missing is a system that factors in a user's shopping preferences and automatically tells them which stores are of their interest. The key challenge in this system is twofold; 1) building a matching algorithm that can combine user preferences with fairly unstructured deals and store information to generate a final rank ordered list, and 2) designing a mobile application that can capture user preferences and display deal information to the user in an intuitive way. In this paper, we present myDeal, a system that automatically ranks deals according to user preferences and presents them to the user on their mobile device.