Deal or no deal: Catering to user preferences

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. A key challenge in this system is building a matching algorithm that can combine user preferences with fairly unstructured deals and store information to generate a final rank ordered list. In this work, we present the first prototype of my Deal, a system that automatically ranks deals according to user preferences and presents them to the user on their mobile device.