Interactive product browsing and configuration using remote augmented reality sales services

Real-time remote sales assistance is an underdeveloped component of online sales services. Solutions involving web page text chat, telephony and video support prove problematic when seeking to remotely guide customers in their sales processes, especially with configurations of physically complex artefacts. Recently, there has been great interest in the application of virtual worlds and augmented reality to create synthetic environments for remote sales of physical artefacts. However, there is a lack of analysis and development of appropriate software services to support these processes. We extend our previous work with the detailed design of configuration context services to support the management of an interactive sales session using augmented reality. We detail the context and configuration services required, presenting a novel data service streaming configuration information to the vendor for business analytics. We expect that a fully implemented configuration management service, based on our design, will improve the remote sales experience for both customers and vendors alike via analysis of the streamed information

CHORUS Deliverable 4.5: Report of the 3rd CHORUS Conference

The third and last CHORUS conference on Multimedia Search Engines took place from the 26th to the 27th of May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. About 100 participants from 15 European countries, the US, Japan and Australia learned about the latest developments in the domain. An exhibition of 13 stands presented 16 research projects currently ongoing around the world

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

Context aware advertising

IP Television (IPTV) has created a new arena for digital advertising that has not been explored to its full potential yet. IPTV allows users to retrieve on demand content and recommended content; however, very limited research has been applied in the domain of advertising in IPTV systems. The diversity of the field led to a lot of mature efforts in the fields of content recommendation and mobile advertising. The introduction of IPTV and smart devices led to the ability to gather more context information that was not subject of study before. This research attempts at studying the different contextual parameters, how to enrich the advertising context to tailor better ads for users, devising a recommendation engine that utilizes the new context, building a prototype to prove the viability of the system and evaluating it on different quality of service and quality of experience measures. To tackle this problem, a review of the state of the art in the field of context-aware advertising as well as the related field of context-aware multimedia have been studied. The intent was to come up with the most relevant contextual parameters that can possibly yield a higher percentage precision for recommending advertisements to users. Subsequently, a prototype application was also developed to validate the feasibility and viability of the approach. The prototype gathers contextual information related to the number of viewers, their age, genders, viewing angles as well as their emotions. The gathered context is then dispatched to a web service which generates advertisement recommendations and sends them back to the user. A scheduler was also implemented to identify the most suitable time to push advertisements to users based on their attention span. To achieve our contributions, a corpus of 421 ads was gathered and processed for streaming. The advertisements were displayed in reality during the holy month of Ramadan, 2016. A data gathering application was developed where sample users were presented with 10 random ads and asked to rate and evaluate the advertisements according to a predetermined criteria. The gathered data was used for training the recommendation engine and computing the latent context-item preferences. This also served to identify the performance of a system that randomly sends advertisements to users. The resulting performance is used as a benchmark to compare our results against. When it comes to the recommendation engine itself, several implementation options were considered that pertain to the methodology to create a vector representation of an advertisement as well as the metric to use to measure the similarity between two advertisement vectors. The goal is to find a representation of advertisements that circumvents the cold start problem and the best similarity measure to use with the different vectorization techniques. A set of experiments have been designed and executed to identify the right vectorization methodology and similarity measure to apply in this problem domain. To evaluate the overall performance of the system, several experiments were designed and executed that cover different quality aspects of the system such as quality of service, quality of experience and quality of context. All three aspects have been measured and our results show that our recommendation engine exhibits a significant improvement over other mechanisms of pushing ads to users that are employed in currently existing systems. The other mechanisms placed in comparison are the random ad generation and targeted ad generation. Targeted ads mechanism relies on demographic information of the viewer with disregard to his/her historical consumption. Our system showed a precision percentage of 69.70% which means that roughly 7 out of 10 recommended ads are actually liked and viewed to the end by the viewer. The practice of randomly generating ads yields a result of 41.11% precision which means that only 4 out of 10 recommended ads are actually liked by viewers. The targeted ads system resulted in 51.39% precision. Our results show that a significant improvement can be introduced when employing context within a recommendation engine. When introducing emotion context, our results show a significant improvement in case the user’s emotion is happiness; however, it showed a degradation of performance when the user’s emotion is sadness. When considering all emotions, the overall results did not show a significant improvement. It is worth noting though that ads recommended based on detected emotions using our systems proved to always be relevant to the user\u27s current mood

Multimodal Generic Framework for Multimedia Documents Adaptation

Today, people are increasingly capable of creating and sharing documents (which generally are multimedia oriented) via the internet. These multimedia documents can be accessed at anytime and anywhere (city, home, etc.) on a wide variety of devices, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. The heterogeneity of devices and user preferences has raised a serious issue for multimedia contents adaptation. Our research focuses on multimedia documents adaptation with a strong focus on interaction with users and exploration of multimodality. We propose a multimodal framework for adapting multimedia documents based on a distributed implementation of W3C’s Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces applied to ubiquitous computing. The core of our proposed architecture is the presence of a smart interaction manager that accepts context related information from sensors in the environment as well as from other sources, including information available on the web and multimodal user inputs. The interaction manager integrates and reasons over this information to predict the user’s situation and service use. A key to realizing this framework is the use of an ontology that undergirds the communication and representation, and the use of the cloud to insure the service continuity on heterogeneous mobile devices. Smart city is assumed as the reference scenario

Designing Human-Centered Collective Intelligence

Human-Centered Collective Intelligence (HCCI) is an emergent research area that seeks to bring together major research areas like machine learning, statistical modeling, information retrieval, market research, and software engineering to address challenges pertaining to deriving intelligent insights and solutions through the collaboration of several intelligent sensors, devices and data sources. An archetypal contextual CI scenario might be concerned with deriving affect-driven intelligence through multimodal emotion detection sources in a bid to determine the likability of one movie trailer over another. On the other hand, the key tenets to designing robust and evolutionary software and infrastructure architecture models to address cross-cutting quality concerns is of keen interest in the “Cloud” age of today. Some of the key quality concerns of interest in CI scenarios span the gamut of security and privacy, scalability, performance, fault-tolerance, and reliability. I present recent advances in CI system design with a focus on highlighting optimal solutions for the aforementioned cross-cutting concerns. I also describe a number of design challenges and a framework that I have determined to be critical to designing CI systems. With inspiration from machine learning, computational advertising, ubiquitous computing, and sociable robotics, this literature incorporates theories and concepts from various viewpoints to empower the collective intelligence engine, ZOEI, to discover affective state and emotional intent across multiple mediums. The discerned affective state is used in recommender systems among others to support content personalization. I dive into the design of optimal architectures that allow humans and intelligent systems to work collectively to solve complex problems. I present an evaluation of various studies that leverage the ZOEI framework to design collective intelligence

The Mobile Generation: Global Transformations at the Cellular Level

Every year we see a new dimension of the ongoing Digital Revolution, which is enabling an abundance of information to move faster, cheaper, in more intelligible forms, in more directions, and across borders of every kind. The exciting new dimension on which the Aspen Institute focused its 2006 Roundtable on Information Technology was mobility, which is making the Digital Revolution ubiquitous. As of this writing, there are over two billion wireless subscribers worldwide and that number is growing rapidly. People are constantly innovating in the use of mobile technologies to allow them to be more interconnected. Almost a half century ago, Ralph Lee Smith conjured up "The Wired Nation," foretelling a world of interactive communication to and from the home that seems commonplace in developed countries today. Now we have a "Wireless World" of communications potentially connecting two billion people to each other with interactive personal communications devices. Widespead adoption of wireless handsets, the increasing use of wireless internet, and the new, on-the-go content that characterizes the new generation of users are changing behaviors in social, political and economic spheres. The devices are easy to use, pervasive and personal. The affordable cell phone has the potential to break down the barriers of poverty and accessibility previously posed by other communications devices. An entire generation that is dependant on ubiquitous mobile technologies is changing the way it works, plays and thinks. Businesses, governments, educational institutions, religious and other organizations in turn are adapting to reach out to this mobile generation via wireless technologies -- from SMS-enabled vending machines in Finland to tech-savvy priests in India willing to conduct prayers transmitted via cell phones. Cellular devices are providing developing economies with opportunities unlike any others previously available. By opening the lines of communication, previously disenfranchised groups can have access to information relating to markets, economic opportunities, jobs, and weather to name just a few. When poor village farmers from Bangladesh can auction their crops on a craigslist-type service over the mobile phone, or government officials gain instantaneous information on contagious diseases via text message, the miracles of mobile connectivity move us from luxury to necessity. And we are only in the early stages of what the mobile electronic communications will mean for mankind. We are now "The Mobile Generation." Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology. To explore the implications of these phenomena, the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program convened 27 leaders from business, academia, government and the non-profit sector to engage in three days of dialogue on related topics. Some are experts in information and communications technologies, others are leaders in the broader society affected by these innovations. Together, they examined the profound changes ahead as a result of the convergence of wireless technologies and the Internet. In the following report of the Roundtable meeting held August 1-4, 2006, J. D. Lasica, author of Darknet and co-founder of Ourmedia.org, deftly sets up, contextualizes, and captures the dialogue on the impact of the new mobility on economic models for businesses and governments, social services, economic development, and personal identity