Award for paper exploring travel behaviour using geotagged photos

A paper by former Deakin University PhD student, Huy Quan Vu and his supervisor, Dr Gang Li, was among the winners at ENTER 2016, an international eTourism conference organised by the International Federation for Information Technology and Travel & Tourism (IFITT) in Bilbao, Spain.

"Exploring the travel behaviour of inbound tourists to Hong Kong using geotagged photos" was awarded third place in the IFITT Journal Paper of the Year Award at the conference. The paper was co-authored by Professor Rob Law (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and Associate Professor Ben Haobin Ye (Sun Yat-sen University, China), and was published in leading international journal Tourism Management.

Dr Li, from Deakin’s School of Information Technology, explained that the paper presented a novel approach to discover travel behaviour at a comprehensive level, without the need of actual engagement with the tourists. Geotagged photos, embedded with temporal and spatial information, were retrieved from social photo sharing sites. Two data mining techniques, named Density Clustering and Markov chains, were employed to mine interesting patterns from the data.

IFITT is described as the leading independent global community for the discussion, exchange and development of knowledge about the use and impact of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the travel and tourism industry.