Data-Moove: a stopover in the labs for a smooth vacation

Finding a restaurant, a concert or a hotel on a tourist trip abroad can sometimes be a real ordeal. Every establishment, every event has its own Facebook account, its own web page, and there are very few sites that effectively aggregate all the things to do in a given area. For tourists, this means spending time on social networks, to the detriment of vacation activities. This is a major challenge for Data-Moove, a French start-up that aims to change this by offering a complete overview of what a region has to offer. On March 2, the start-up inaugurated a kiosk at Saint-Barthélemy airport in the French West Indies. Using it, travelers arriving on the island can obtain an overview of the activities on offer in the area, and thus put together a vacation itinerary. The terminal is complemented by a mobile application proposed by the island's Tourism Committee and available free of charge to the end user.

Such a service meets a growing demand from tourist offices to use digital technology to enhance the value of their regions. To meet this need, Data-Moove teamed up with the research teams at EURECOM, part of the Carnot institute Télécom & Société numérique. The partnership between the two players dates back to 2015. At the time, the team led by Raphaël Troncy, a data science researcher at EURECOM, was involved in EIT Digital's European 3cixty project. " We were looking to automate the collection of information related to tourism and culture," recalls the scientist. " We wanted a platform that would bring together everything to do with accommodation, points of interest, seasonal sporting or cultural activities..." In short: to offer comprehensive, highly local knowledge. Launched a year earlier, the project had already produced a mature technical solution. All that was missing was a commercial relay, and it was Data-Moove, a newly created company, that embodied it until the end of the project in 2016.

Search social networks

During the three years of the 3cixty project, EURECOM researchers had to solve the problem of heterogeneous information sources. TripAdvisor and Facebook do not use the same languages, and information about a restaurant is not in the same form. So we had to represent these data flows collected on social networks by semantic graphs: clouds made up of words linked together according to the nature of their relationship. People, places, dates and actions are thus described in a standardized way, then processed to return standardized information to the user, whatever the source of this information.

Raphaël Troncy points out that " because we aggregate numerous sources, there's a good chance that the same information will be present twice in the data stream ," introducing a second technical challenge. Solving this duplication problem involves measuring the similarity between the location, date and title of events. " We therefore developed a learning algorithm to automatically carry out this similarity study", explains the researcher. Another learning model was set up to automatically predict the category of a poorly described event. This enables information to be presented directly as sports, theater or music, for example.

The technical solutions developed during 3cixty were implemented by Data-Moove in its first product: City Moove, the basis of an application like the one used by Saint-Barthélemy. " Our aggregated information flow technology can also be connected to an existing application ," emphasizes Frédéric Bossard, co-founder of Data-Moove. The aim is to avoid, as far as possible, the multiplication of digital offerings in a given territory. For this reason, the company prefers to work with tourist offices to improve existing tools. " The problem with territories is that they often have too many applications, each specialized in a particular field," notes the entrepreneur.

Tomorrow's tourism, brick by brick

The two partners have decided to capitalize on this success by taking the use of digital technology in tourism offerings a step further. In 2017, they became involved in the European PasTime project - again supported by EIT Digital - the aim of which is to offer activity recommendations during stays. " The idea is to ask the end user what time they will arrive in a city, and suggest a route directly," Raphaël Troncy sums up. Here again, we carried out learning research on large volumes of data. Typical profiles have been constructed from user interactions on social networks. " The real challenge is to build a package, i.e. to link centers of interest to tastes in food and drink and event preferences," describes the researcher. It's an additional layer to City Moove, adding a dimension of personalization.

A third layer is already planned. EURECOM and Data-Moove have been working since February 2018 on a new product: an intelligent conversational assistant to answer questions about a territory's tourism offering. This work, entitled MinoTour, is taking place as part of the European H2020 Data Pitch project. The chatbot set up will also have to learn from users' searches and provide answers based on aggregated feeds built up by City Moove. Frédéric Bossard points out: " There's a logic in our products : that of building, brick by brick, from the database to the conversational agent, the solutions best suited to territories. "

After Saint-Barthélemy, Data-Moove solutions will be tested in Saint-Tropez, Madeira and the wider Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. These are areas where the stakes are high for tourism, and which will enable us to continue improving our products to better satisfy both local residents and tourists.

The advantage of a partnership with EURECOM: "An operational vision".

One of the objectives of the Carnot Télécom & Société numérique institute is to professionalize relations between companies and researchers. Frédéric Bossard, co-founder of Data-Moove, comments: " Working with EURECOM is a pleasure, because the researchers have a real operational vision, which is rare with academic partners. They quickly understand our constraints and where we want to go. It was the quality of this dialogue that convinced us to take the partnership beyond simple collaboration. Today, EURECOM is a Data-Moove partner, having acquired a stake in the company. By making their laboratories and knowledge available, they enable us to take our product development to the next level.