IntelliShopper: a proactive, personal, private shopping assistant

ABSTRACT

The IntelliShopper is a shopping assistant designed to empower consumers. It is a personal assistant in that it observes the users while shopping and learns their preferences with respect to various features that characterize shopping items. It is proactive in that it remembers the users' requests and autonomously monitors vendor sites for new items that might match the users' needs and preferences. Finally, it protects users' privacy by means of pseudonymity, IP anony\-mizing, and trusted filtering. Pseudonymity is achieved through the use of personae; we show that this approach also behooves successful classification. IP anonymizing can be performed in at least two manners, which we discuss and compare in the context of our application. Trusted filtering --- as opposed to merchant-based filtering --- improves privacy by allowing users to select their preferred privacy representative. This paper introduces the IntelliShopper system, discusses its architecture and components, describes a prototype implementation, and outlines preliminary evaluations of its performance.

REFERENCES

• 1: Robert M. Arlein , Ben Jai , Markus Jakobsson , Fabian Monrose , Michael K. Reiter, Privacy-preserving global customization, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM conference on Electronic commerce, p.176-184, October 17-20, 2000, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States [doi>10.1145/352871.352891]
• 2: David L. Chaum, Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms, Communications of the ACM, v.24 n.2, p.84-90, Feb. 1981 [doi>10.1145/358549.358563]
• 3: Upendra Shardanand , Pattie Maes, Social information filtering: algorithms for automating “word of mouth”, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.210-217, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223931]
• 4: Robert B. Doorenbos , Oren Etzioni , Daniel S. Weld, A scalable comparison-shopping agent for the World-Wide Web, Proceedings of the first international conference on Autonomous agents, p.39-48, February 05-08, 1997, Marina del Rey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/267658.267666]
• 5: Eran Gabber , Phillip B. Gibbons , Yossi Matias , Alain J. Mayer, How to Make Personalized Web Browising Simple, Secure, and Anonymous, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Financial Cryptography, p.17-32, February 24-28, 1997
• 6: Yael Gertner , Yuval Ishai , Eyal Kushilevitz , Tal Malkin, Protecting data privacy in private information retrieval schemes, Proceedings of the thirtieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, p.151-160, May 24-26, 1998, Dallas, Texas, United States [doi>10.1145/276698.276723]
• 7: Amy R. Greenwald , Jeffrey O. Kephart, Shopbots and Pricebots, Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, p.506-511, July 31-August 06, 1999
• 8: Markus Jakobsson, Flash mixing, Proceedings of the eighteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing, p.83-89, May 04-06, 1999, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/301308.301333]
• 9: Markus Jakobsson , Moti Yung, On Assurance Structures for WWW Commerce, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Financial Cryptography, p.141-157, February 23-25, 1998
• 10: T. Joachims, D. Freitag, and T. Mitchell. WebWatcher: A tour guide for the world wide web. In Proc. Intl. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, 1997.
• 11: Jeffrey O. Kephart , Amy R. Greenwald, Shopbot economics, Proceedings of the third annual conference on Autonomous Agents, p.378-379, April 1999, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/301136.301243]
• 12: Henry Lieberman, Autonomous interface agents, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.67-74, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258592]
• 13: Ling Liu , Calton Pu , Wei Tang, WebCQ-detecting and delivering information changes on the web, Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Information and knowledge management, p.512-519, November 06-11, 2000, McLean, Virginia, United States [doi>10.1145/354756.354860]
• 14: Pattie Maes, Agents that reduce work and information overload, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.7, p.30-40, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/176789.176792]
• 15: Pattie Maes , Robert H. Guttman , Alexandros G. Moukas, Agents that buy and sell, Communications of the ACM, v.42 n.3, p.81-ff., March 1999 [doi>10.1145/295685.295716]
• 16: Masashi Mitomo , Kaoru Kurosawa, Attack for Flash MIX, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security: Advances in Cryptology, p.192-204, December 03-07, 2000
• 17: Benjamin Nguyen , Serge Abiteboul , Grégory Cobena , Mihaí Preda, Monitoring XML data on the Web, ACM SIGMOD Record, v.30 n.2, p.437-448, June 2001
• 18: Michael K. Reiter , Aviel D. Rubin, Anonymous Web transactions with Crowds, Communications of the ACM, v.42 n.2, p.32-48, Feb. 1999 [doi>10.1145/293411.293778]
• 19: Paul F. Syverson , David M. Goldschlag , Michael G. Reed, Anonymous Connections and Onion Routing, Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p.44, May 04-07, 1997

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.4 Electronic Commerce

Additional Classification:
  E. Data
  E.3 DATA ENCRYPTION
      Subjects: Public key cryptosystems

  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Relevance feedback; Information filtering
      H.3.4 Systems and Software
          Subjects: User profiles and alert services

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
            Subjects: Multiagent systems; Intelligent agents

Keywords:
learning, monitoring, personalization, privacy, pro-activity, shopping