Mobiquity, a digital engagement provider for the Fortune 500, today announced a four-year research partnership with the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam to drive digital innovation. The company will collaborate with the VU’s Computational Intelligence Group as it scientifically co-supervises and financially sponsors Ph.D. student research in the fields of machine learning and motivational interactions in digital environments. 
Through this research, the partners plan to demonstrate how analytics can improve mobile user satisfaction by means of novel machine learning techniques.
“Mobiquity believes in the importance of promoting unbiased research as a necessary step in leading digital innovation in healthcare and other industries,” said Nesko Jancic, Mobiquity’s Managing Director of Advanced Analytics and business sponsor of the research. “Combined with our experience working with top brands, the research findings will enable us to help our clients deepen user engagement through their digital solutions and realize meaningful business results.”
The joint research will focus on how the development of analytics that underpin mobile applications, along with machine learning techniques, can be used to deliver increasingly personalized experiences. As indicated by its client experience, Mobiquity believes that hyper-personalization will lead to a more engaged user, ultimately augmenting user satisfaction.
The partners strive to accomplish two main objectives with their research. First, they intend to develop methods that would allow a mobile application to intelligently select interventions from a predefined set to support a particular user. Second, they seek for the mobile application to choose these interventions based on predictions of user statuses. In doing so, they would be enabling mobile applications to learn when and how to apply the intervention that best suits a user with respect to a particular goal or purpose. Moreover, such mobile applications would rapidly adjust as the user continues to interact with them and provide more behavioural data.
For the VU Amsterdam, the partnership offers great benefits. “The partnership allows us to work on real-life problems and enables us to intensively collaborate with a company that has ample experience in the development of mobile applications and the analysis of the associated data. The combination with our expertise in the area of machine learning is, in our opinion, a great match. We can really push the boundary together to create more personalized and engaging apps,” said Mark Hoogendoorn, one of the supervisors of the Ph.D. students at the VU University Amsterdam.
The research will start by leveraging a relevant reinforcement learning method that selects suitable actions for particular situations based on a trade-off between exploration and exploitation. In this approach, exploration gauges effectiveness by considering actions that the user has and has not tried whereas exploitation chooses an action known to work in a particular situation. Actions are selected based on the expected reward they will yield.
Supervision of the study will be provided by the VU’s Prof. Dr. Guszti Eiben, Dr. Mark Hoogendoorn, and Dr. Evert Haasdijk along with Mobiquity’s Dr. Eduardo Barbaro. The two organizations plan to publish the outcomes of their research in peer-reviewed journals as well as present them at international conferences.
The VU is one of the top universities in the Netherlands and Europe, co-authoring over 4,000 scientific publications per year. It was founded in 1880 and has more than 24,000 students. The university has a variety of faculties, at which research in a wide variety of technical, natural, and human-related disciplines is conducted. The high quality of research at the VU has been repeatedly recognized by visiting evaluation committees. The Computer Science Department within the Faculty of Sciences (FEW) is one of the leading research units in the Computer and Information Science in NL. The department participates in numerous EU and nationally funded research projects as well as projects funded by industry.
Mobiquity Inc. is a digital engagement provider that strategizes, designs, builds, and optimizes data-driven solutions for more than 200 leading brands around the world. With a mission to humanize digital experiences, its team of consultants, designers, engineers, and data scientists engages consumers, patients, and employees across all channels, including mobile, web, Internet of Things, and voice, wherever they are. Each day, 50 million users interact with Mobiquity’s solutions – from accessing weather information and placing mobile orders to tracking patient trends and receiving continuous care™. Mobiquity is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner with competencies in IoT, Mobile, Healthcare, and Life Sciences and is an AWS Managed Service Partner. Since 2011, it has worked with AWS to deliver 100% cloud-based innovation to its clients.
