This research investigated difficulties and challenges that older customers face in a supermarket environment in China, so as to understand the way in which the supermarket environment and service can improve older customers’ shopping experience. An ethnographic user study, which combines video-based direct observations, in-depth interviews and a cultural probe information gathering pack, has b...

Customers often evaluate products at brick-and-mortar stores to identify their “best fit” product, but end up buying this product not at the store but at a competing online retailer to take advantage of lower prices. This free-riding behavior by customers is referred to as “showrooming.” We analyze three strategies to counter the effect of showrooming that may improve profits for the brick-and-...

A tangible programming interface called ``Push-pin'' is proposed, which involves end-users in designing smart home programs for home appliance automation. Programming on the Push-pin system is based on a stimulus-response model in which an appliance connected to another appliance via a network gets activated when the other appliance is activated. To interconnect two appliances, the user puts a ...

In energy conservation research, energy disaggregation becomes an increasingly critical task, which takes a whole home electricity signal and decomposes it into its component appliances. While householder’s daily energy usage behavior acts as one powerful cue for breaking down the entire household’s energy consumption, existing works rarely modeled it straightforwardly. Instead, they either ign...

Purpose – One of the key elements in the banking industry relies on the appropriate selection of customers. To manage credit risk, banks dedicate special efforts to classify customers according to their risk. The usual decision-making process consists of gathering personal and financial information about the borrower. Processing this information can be time-consuming, and presents some difficul...

Recently, smartphones have been used as remote controllers for home appliances through connectivity of mobile telecom network or Wi-Fi. To control several home appliances in a room, a mechanism is required for a smartphone to correctly select the target appliance. Through the built-in electronic compass function in the smartphone, we propose a scheme called Point-and-Control (PnC) that allows a...

Conjoint analysis is a statistical technique to reveal customers’ invisible preference using series of questions regarding tradeoffs in products. In this paper, we propose a new variant of this technique that uses products layout and customers’ actions in a store instead of conjoint cards and answers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by making agent-based instore simulator that c...