Parameter-free discovery and recommendation of areas-of-interest

The task of discovering places of interest is a key step for many location-based recommendation tasks. In this paper we propose a fully unsupervised and parameter-free approach to deal with this problem based on the collection of geotagged photos. While previous papers are mostly devoted to discovering points (POI), we focus on areas of interest (AOI). Recommendation of better matches the traditional tourist goals and allows to robustly incorporate the interests of many users resulting in less subjective recommendations. The typical question that can be answered with the algorithm is formulated as "Where can one spend T minutes/hours walking around to observe as many attractive places as possible?"