Kin-ichiroh Tokiwa

Generally, the majority of customers move along the areas located outside of the main circular path on the sales floor of a supermarket. At the same time, statistically it has been determined that a longer shopping path leads to a higher purchase volume and higher volume customers have the possibility of spending more time within the inner part of a sales floor. Thus, we expect an improvement in purchasing by opening shopping paths into the inner areas to enhance customers' chances to discover new products. Realising an effective path extension to increase customers' purchases requires us to perceive the features of higher and lower volume customers. The study aims to establish a classification rule based on customers' behavioural features within inner areas. The paper provides an explanation of our method to quantify customers' behavioural features and reports the outcomes from the exploratory analysis using real-world shopping path and purchase data.

Many university students, especially engineering students, hesitate to state their opinions or ask questions in front of other students during classroom lectures since they do not want to feel embarrassed or humiliated, or just because they need some practice speaking in front of an audience. In this study, we develop a gamified (arranged as a game), half-anonymized (incorporating only very slight clues to identify other users) education support system that can be utilized to improve classroom interactions and propose an educational methodology that encourages class members to engage simultaneously in both off-and online communication. Using the system, students take part in an online, mediated class-wide discussion, while also engaging in face-to-face verbal discussion with their neighbors. The system provides students with an interactive, cooperative learning environment free of the influence of real-world human relationships that can impede students' active engagement in class. The contribution of the paper is in its investigation of how to make students more proactive in class by harnessing the power of gamification and limited anonymity. We also report the findings from an experimental implementation of the system in a class of 17 university engineering students. © 2013 IEEE.