CONCEPTUALIZING CONTEXT FOR ADAPTIVE PERVASIVE COMMERCE

In retail, demographics are currently regarded as the most convenient base for successful personalized marketing. However, signs point to the dormant power of context recognition. While technologies that can sense the environment are advanced, questions such as what to sense and how to adapt context are largely unanswered. In this paper, we analyze the purchase context of a retail outlet and suggest a context model for adaptive pervasive commerce. Furthermore, we introduce one approach how to conceptualize context that may be applied to conceptualize context for adaptive pervasive advertising applications so that they really deliver on their potential: showing the right message to the right recipient at the right time

Place-aware content selection from dynamic web sources for public displays

Public digital displays could greatly benefit from the ability to dynamically select from the Internet content items that would be strongly related with the place where each display is installed. Generically, this is similar to the type of problem addressed by recommender systems. However, the usage context of a public display raises specific challenges that may limit the applicability of existing recommender systems. In this paper, we explore the creation of a recommender system for public situated displays that is able to autonomously select relevant content from Internet sources using keywords as input. This type of recommender system should enable public displays to become devices for Internet information delivery in public spaces, while also making them more situated in the social settings in which they are installed. We have created a recommender system based on these principles and we have conducted two studies to evaluate the perceived performance of the system. The results have shown that keywords can be very effective in driving user-generated content, but they often need to be complemented with contextual information that disambiguates their semanticsFundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - SFRH/BD/31292/200

Timely and keyword-based dynamic content selection for public displays

In public display systems determine what to present and when is a central feature. Although several adaptive scheduling alternatives have been explored, which introduce sensibility of the display to some type of external variable, they are still very dependent on the user in their behavior, content specific in their nature and very rigid in their adaptation to their social environment, not providing visitors of the place with appropriate, rich and personalized information according to their interests and expectations. There is a need for solutions that successfully integrate the wealth of dynamic web sources as providers for situated and updated content with social and contextual environment around the display so as to present the most appropriate content at every moment, and thus improving the utility of the system. In this paper, we present a recommender system for public situated displays that is able to autonomously select relevant content from Internet sources using a keyword-based place model as input. Based on external relevance criteria the system finds and pre-selects only those sources that are more relevant, and an adaptive scheduling algorithm continuously select content that are relevant, timely, in accordance with the place model, sensitive to immediate indications of interest and balanced to serve the broad range of interests of the target population. To evaluate this system we have carried out two partial experiments. The results showed that keyword-based shared place models jointly with content specific relevance models are a simple and valid approach to user-generated content for public displays.The first author was supported by a Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology scholarship (SFRH/BD/31292/2006)

Context Adaptivity as Enabler for Meaningful Pervasive Advertising

Socio-demographic user profiles are currently regarded as the most convenient base for successful personalized advertising. However, signs point to the dormant power of context recognition. While technologies that can sense the environment are increasingly advanced, questions such as what to sense and how to adapt to a consumer’s context are largely unanswered. Research in the field is scattered and frequently prototype-driven. What the community lacks is a thorough methodology to provide the basis for any context-adaptive system: conceptualizing context. This position paper describes our current research of conceptualizing context for pervasive advertising. It summarizes findings from literature analysis and proposes a methodology for context conceptualization, which is currently work-in-progress

Control framework and services scenarios of provisioning N-Screen services in interactive digital signage

U ovom radu predstavljamo upravljački sustav i scenarije za osiguranje N-Screen usluga u interaktivnom digitalnom znakovlju. Digitalno znakovlje osigurava niz displeja s obavijestima i sadržajem visoke rezolucije na različitim javnim mjestima i događajima. Osiguranje N-Screen usluga u interaktivnom digitalnom znakovlju omogućuje pružatelju usluge osiguranje sadržaja raznovrsnim uređajima, omogućuje krajnjem korisniku slanje sadržaja digitalnog znakovlja do N-Screen uređaja korisnika i obratno, na različitim lokacijama i u različito vrijeme. Pružamo N-Screen usluge u interaktivnom digitalnom znakovlju prilagođavajući sadržaj korisničkom sučelju u skladu s dimenzijom, rasporedom, adaptacijom lokaliziranog sadržaja, sinhronizacijom i trajanjem poruke u različitim uređajima korisnikovog N-Screen uređaja. Predstavljamo N-Screen User Interface Management Server (NUIMS), Digital Signage Management Server (DSMS), i Localized Content and Session Management Agent (LCSMA) kao podršku N-Screen uslugama. Nadalje, N-Screen Devices Repository (NDR) u DSMS-u osigurava da statički profil N-Screen uređaja korisnika raspoređuje sadržaj na sve njihove uređaje, a LCSMA omogućuje da dinamički profil sinhronizira sadržaj na različitim uređajima. Uz to, predlažemo postupke, protokole i scenarije usluga u svrhu slanja sadržaja digitalnog znakovlja do N-Screen uređaja korisnika, metode kontinuiranog sinhroniziranja sadržaja displeja kroz displeje različitog znakovlja i dijeljenja s drugim korisnicima uz upotrebu informacijskog servera korisnika.In this article, we present the control framework and services scenarios of provisioning N-Screen services in interactive digital signage. Digital Signage provides a variety of high-resolution content and information displays at different public places and events. Provisioning N-Screen services in interactive digital signage enables the service providers to provide content to heterogeneous devices, allows the end user to share content from the digital signage to the user N-Screen devices and vice versa at different locations and times. We provide N-Screen services in interactive digital signage by adapting the content user interface according to user\u27s N-Screen device size, layout, localized content adaptation, synchronization and session continuity over heterogeneous devices. We introduce the N-Screen User Interface Management Server (NUIMS), Digital Signage Management Server (DSMS), and Localized Content and Session Management Agent (LCSMA) to support N-Screen services. Furthermore, the N-Screen Devices Repository (NDR) at the DSMS keeps the users N-Screen devices static profile in order to share the content across all of their devices, and the LCSMA maintains the dynamic profile to synchronize content on heterogeneous devices. In addition, we suggest procedures, protocols and service scenarios to share the content of the digital signage to user’s N-Screen devices, methods to synchronize the content display over heterogeneous signage displays with content session continuity and to share with other users using the user information server

Screen real estate ownership based mechanism for negotiating advertisement display

As popularity of online video grows, a number of models of advertising are emerging. It is typically the brokers – usually the operators of websites – who maintain the balance between content and advertising. Existing approaches focus primarily on personalizing advertisements for viewer segments, with minimal decision-making capacity for individual viewers. We take a resource ownership view on this problem. We view consumers’ attention space, which can be abstracted as a display screen for an engaged viewer, as precious resource owned by the viewer. Viewers pay for the content they wish to view in dollars, as well as in terms of their attention. Specifically, advertisers may make partial payment for a viewer’s content, in return for receiving the viewer’s attention to their advertising. Our approach, named “FlexAdSense”, is based on CyberOrgs model, which encapsulates distributed owned resources for multi-agent computations. We build a market of viewers’ attention space in which advertisers can trade, just as viewers can trade in a market of content. We have developed key mechanisms to give viewers flexible control over the display of advertisements in real time. Specific policies needed for automated negotiations can be plugged-in. This approach relaxes the exclusivity of the relationship between advertisers and brokers, and empowers viewers, enhancing their viewing experience. This thesis presents the rationale, design, implementation, and evaluation of FlexAdSense. Feature comparison with existing advertising mechanisms shows how FlexAdSense enables viewers to control with fine-grained flexibility. Experimental results demonstrate the scalability of the approach, as the number of viewers increases. A preliminary analysis of user overhead illustrates minimal attention overhead for viewers as they customize their policies

Real-time localisation system for GPS denied open areas using smart street furniture

Real-time measurement of crowd dynamics has been attracting significant interest, as it has many applications including real-time monitoring of emergencies and evacuation plans. To effectively measure crowd behaviour, an accurate estimate for pedestrians’ locations is required. However, estimating pedestrians’ locations is a great challenge especially for open areas with poor Global Positioning System (GPS) signal reception and/or lack of infrastructure to install expensive solutions such as video-based systems. Street furniture assets such as rubbish bins have become smart, as they have been equipped with low-power sensors. Currently, their role is limited to certain applications such as waste management. We believe that the role of street furniture can be extended to include building real-time localisation systems as street furniture provides excellent coverage across different areas such as parks, streets, homes, universities. In this thesis, we propose a novel wireless sensor network architecture designed for smart street furniture. We extend the functionality of sensor nodes to act as soft Access Point (AP), sensing Wifi signals received from surrounding Wifi-enabled devices. Our proposed architecture includes a real-time and low-power design for sensor nodes. We attached sensor nodes to rubbish bins located in a busy GPS denied open area at Murdoch University (Perth, Western Australia), known as Bush Court. This enabled us to introduce two unique Wifi-based localisation datasets: the first is the Fingerprint dataset called MurdochBushCourtLoC-FP (MBCLFP) in which four users generated Wifi fingerprints for all available cells in the gridded Bush Court, called Reference Points (RPs), using their smartphones, and the second is the APs dataset called MurdochBushCourtLoC-AP (MBCLAP) that includes auto-generated records received from over 1000 users’ devices. Finally, we developed a real-time localisation approach based on the two datasets using a four-layer deep learning classifier. The approach includes a light-weight algorithm to label the MBCLAP dataset using the MBCLFP dataset and convert the MBCLAP dataset to be synchronous. With the use of our proposed approach, up to 19% improvement in location prediction is achieved

QoS and QoE Aware N-Screen Multicast Service

The paper focuses on ensuring the quality-of-service (QoS) and quality-of-experience (QoE) requirements of users having heterogeneous devices in a multicast session. QoS parameters such as bit rate, delays, and packet losses are good indicators for optimizing network services but fall short in characterizing user perception (QoE). In N-Screen service, the users have different devices with heterogeneous attributes like screen size, resolution, and access network interface, and the users have different QoE on N-Screen devices with the same QoS parameters. We formulate the objective function of the N-Screen multicast grouping to ensure the minimum user’s QoE with smaller bandwidth requirement. We propose a dynamic user reassignment scheme to maintain and satisfy the QoE by adapting the user’s membership to the varying network conditions. The proposed schemes combine the available bandwidth and multimedia visual quality to ensure the QoS and QoE. In the network architecture, we introduce the functions of the QoS and QoE aware multicast group management and the estimation schemes for the QoS and QoE parameters. The simulation results show that the proposed multicast service ensures the network QoS and guarantees the QoE of users in the varying network conditions

A framework for responsive content adaptation in electronic display networks

Recent trends show an increase in the availability and functionality of handheld devices, wireless network technology, and electronic display networks. We propose the novel integration of these technologies to provide wireless access to content delivered to large-screen display systems. Content adaptation is used as a method of reformatting web pages to display more appropriately on handheld devices, and to remove unwanted content. A framework is presented that facilitates content adaptation, implemented as an adaptation layer, which is extended to provide personalization of adaptation settings and response to network conditions. The framework is implemented as a proxy server for a wireless network, and handles HTML and XML documents. Once a document has been requested by a user, the HTML/XML is retrieved and parsed, creating a Document Object Model tree representation. It is then altered according to the user’s personal settings or predefined settings, based on current network usage and the network resources available. Three adaptation techniques were implemented; spatial representation, which generates an image map of the document, text summarization, which creates a tree view representation of a document, and tag extraction, which replaces specific tags with links. Three proof-of-concept systems were developed in order to test the robustness of the framework. A system for use with digital slide shows, a digital signage system, and a generalized system for use with the internet were implemented. Testing was performed by accessing sample web pages through the content adaptation proxy server. Tag extraction works correctly for all HTML and XML document structures, whereas spatial representation and text summarization are limited to a controlled subset. Results indicate that the adaptive system has the ability to reduce average bandwidth usage, by decreasing the amount of data on the network, thereby allowing a greater number of users access to content. This suggests that responsive content adaptation has a positive influence on network performance metrics