Research Project #11

Topic: Big Data Opportunities for Enhanced Digital Retail Business Processes

Project Description: Digital retail leads to the generation of an enormous amount of consumer interaction data that offers insights into consumer behavior patterns, needs and influence of gender on customer experience. The objective of this project is to investigate procedures and architectures appropriate for the analysis of large amount of consumer interaction data. The knowledge gained in this research project will be a set of guidelines and architectures describing how to use consumer interaction data in digital retail business and operations. These may include optimization in customer experience, change in collection and processing of data, as well as new possible solutions to use the collected data.

Researcher: This research project will be carried out by ESR 11 Douglas da Rocha Cirqueira.

Host Supervisor: This position is supervised by Markus Hofer, who is responsible at RLB for introducing new payment technologies and systems to the product and service portfolio of the banking group. He is at Raiffeisen currently leading the introduction of new mobile payment solutions to the Austrian market. He has significant expertise in mobile and banking technologies.

Host Institution: RLB is Austria’s leading regional bank. It has a strong customer focus and is a secure and reliable partner for private, corporate and institutional customers. Customers are supported with targeted and customised financial and business services.

Academic Supervisor: Since RLB as non-academic beneficiary does not provide PhD programs academic supervision for the PhD will be held by Dr. Marija Bezbradica at Dublin City University. Marija Bezbradica is a Lecturer at the School of Computing. Her skills include machine learning and data mining as well as applied mathematics, statistics and numerical analysis, with extensive expertise in high performance computing and distributed systems. To provide the Early Stage Researcher of this position a local academic supervisor academic co-supervision will be held by Dr. Dietmar Nedbal. Dietmar Nedbal is professor for Economic Computer Science. His main research focuses are big data, cloud computing and b2b integration solutions.  

University: Dublin City University comprises ca. 16,000 students with a continuing focus on personal, academic and professional life-skill development. DCU regularly feature among the top young universities globally as measured by the Times Higher Education Top 100 under 50 and the QS Top 50 under 50. DCU has also been awarded prestigious HR Excellence in Research accreditation by the European Commission. The School of Computing is a stimulating environment for research, particularly in the areas of localization, data analytics, software engineering, scientific computing and cloud computing. It currently has over 100 postgraduate research students and a wide range of funded projects at national and international level.

Secondments: This position includes 2 secondments to partner organisations. The planned secondments will be to

  • Fachhochschule Oberösterreich (under supervision of Prof. Auinger), in month 18 for 4 months, for ‘experiments and preparation of co-authored publications’,
  • TU Eindhoven (under supervision of Prof. Tom van Woensel), in month 38 for 3 months, for ‘integration of payment with retail processes’.