PLANNING A NIGHT OUT

George Lewis

Friday, February 1, 2013

Planning a night out is hard!

THE PROBLEM

Friday, February 1, 2013

Get a machine to plan my night for me

THE SOLUTION:

Friday, February 1, 2013

Returns an itinerary of related venues

THE MACHINE:

Friday, February 1, 2013

THE ALGORITHM

• Search for nearby venues

• Parse descriptions and reviews using Latent Semantic Analysis to determine similarity

• Build a weight function that combines distance, similarity, and user reviews.

• Pick the next stop proportionally to this weight function.

Friday, February 1, 2013

THE STACK

• Data comes from FourSquare API and NYMag.com

• Stored in MongoDB

• Semantic similarity determined using numpy

•Weight function calculated using scipy

Back End

•Written in html and css using twitter Bootstrap

• Pages generated using Jinja and Flask

• Graphics courtesy of GoogleMaps API

• Communicate with server using jquery

Up Front

Friday, February 1, 2013

WHOAMI

• PhD in Experimental Particle Physics

•Worked on the Large Hadron Collider

• Created statistical tools for ATLAS experiment

George Lewis

Friday, February 1, 2013