Abstract
Traditional venue and tour recommendation systems do not necessarily provide a diverse set of recommendations and leave little room for serendipity. In this article, we design MPG, a Mobile Personal Guide that recommends: (i) a set of diverse yet surprisingly interesting venues that are aligned to user preferences and (ii) a set of routes, constructed from the recommended venues. We also introduce EPUI, an Experimental Platform for Urban Informatics. Our comparison with the state-of-the-art schemes indicates that MPG is capable of providing high-quality venues and route recommendations while incorporating seamlessly both the notion of diversity and that of serendipity.