Rendering transport behaviours more sustainable is a pressing issue of our times. In this paper, we rely on the deep penetration of mobile phones in order to influence citizens’ behavior through data-driven mobility and persuasive profiles. Our proposed approach aims to nudge users on a personalized level in order to change their mobility behavior and make more sustainable choices. To achieve our goal, first we leverage pervasive mobile sensing to uncover users’ mobility patterns and use of transportation modes. Second, we construct users’ persuadability profiles by considering their personality and mobility behavior. With the use of the aforementioned information we generate personalized interventions that nudge users to adopt sustainable transportation habits. These interventions rely on persuasive technologies and are embedded in a route planning application for smartphones. A pilot study with 30 participants using the system for 6 weeks provided fairly positive evaluation results in terms of the acceptance of our approach and revealed instances of behavioural change.

In recent years, persuasive interventions for inducing sustainable mobility behaviours have become an active research field. This review paper systematically analyses existing approaches and prototype systems as well as field studies and describes and classifies the persuasive strategies used for changing behaviours in the domain of mobility and transport. We provide a review of 44 papers on persuasive technology for sustainable transportation aiming to (i) answer important questions regarding the effectiveness of persuasive technology for changing mobility behaviours, (ii) summarize and highlight trends in the technology design, research methods, strategies and theories, (iii) uncover limitations of existing approaches and applications, and (iv) suggest directions for future research.

In order to predict user behaviour recommender systems generate views of the world according to expressed and known user preferences resulting in 'filter bubbles'. This kind of bubbles generally help users to easily identify objects they like. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to escape their personalized world and change their perspectives especially in domains such as music. In this work we present a methodology and related system that allows users to initiate explorations of music genres by taking a gradual path towards the desired genre while viewing the preferences of other users. The proposed methodology is based on identifying 'latent genres' and using user preference graphs for detecting optimal paths towards a selected target latent genre. In this process we generate suggestions of artists a user should listen to, aiming towards serendipitous and novel encounters. We have implemented our approach in a music recommendation system and evaluated it with encouraging results.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of information aggregation markets (IAMs) for community-based idea management and to present IDeM, a novel Internet-based software tool that can be used for generating and evaluating new ideas utilizing the concept of IAMs. Design/methodology/approach – Starting with a review of existing methods for collective intelligence, IAMs are identified as a prominent method for collective intelligence. Specific requirements for exploring IAMs for idea management are derived. Based on these requirements, a software tool for implementing IAMs in the context of idea management is developed (IDeM). IDeM has been evaluated and evaluation results are used to identify IDeM's benefits and limitations. A review of related work points out the innovative characteristics of IDeM. Findings – Evaluation results indicate that IAMs is an efficient method for idea generation and evaluation. Moreover IDeM is perceived both as easy to use and efficient in supporting idea generation and evaluation. Practical implications – IDeM can be used by commercial or other organizations for supporting generation and evaluation of new ideas. Originality/value – IDeM's innovative aspects are: in addition to trading, it allows users involvement by means of new idea submission, rating of ideas and commenting on ideas; it confronts the uncertainty of new idea related events by offering an expert based valuation mechanism.; and it extends the typical output of IAM tools – which is price of idea-stocks – by calculating the volume weighted average price.