NFC-Teknologiaan Pohjautuvan Älyilmoitustaulun Konseptin Suunnittelu ja Toteutus

Tampere railway station area is going through a renovation in following decades and thus it is a relevant time to research possibilities to improve the area with smart city technologies. KÄPÄLÄ project which is a collaboration of Tampere University and Tampere University of Technology focusing on smart city technologies initiated a research towards innovative service concepts on railway station area. This thesis describes planning, deployment and evaluation of prototype system titled Smart Bulletin Board which is an electronic Bulletin board with motion detection and NFC interaction which was concluded to be suitable topic of research. The aim for this thesis was to test the SBB concept’s user experience and appeal, map possibilities and problems encountered in the deployment of public display system utilizing motion detection and NFC interaction. The goal is also to explore if the NFC technology is suitable and novel technology to act as a data transfer bridge between public display and personal smartphone. This thesis consists of literary review, description of design and implementation phases and two user evaluation studies. The results of the research suggest that there is promise for the SBB concept as user experience for the system was prominently positive. The user evaluations uncovered multiple interesting usability problems related to combination of public display system, NFC and motion detection interaction which could be researched further. The results of this thesis could be used by parties planning to implement a public display system or parties involved with NFC or motion detection controls to gain insight on issues related to their usage on public setting

Using Video for Indoor Navigation Guidance

Buildings such as shopping malls or university campuses are complex and have always been a challenge to walk through. While map is the commonly used navigation aid, it has several limitations. On the other hand, there are studies about how visual navigation elements can help people to navigate better. This thesis would like to explore if video can be used as an alternative method to provide navigation information. The findings of visual navigation elements from other studies were implemented in videos. A user study was performed to see the feasibility of video to be used as an alternative medium to present navigation information. There were 10 participants who joined the user study. In the user study, the participants were asked to understand routes by reading a map and watching a navigation video and then walk to the specified rooms. Questionnaires were provided to the participants to record their experience in using the map and the video to understand the routes. Interviews were conducted at the end of each user study to get more comments and feedback from the participants. The user study showed that watching navigation videos allow participants to perform navigation in a more efficient manner with fewer error compared to reading maps. The experience of using videos to receive navigation information is also better compared to maps. The result of the user study suggests that providing navigational information in the form of video can be considered as an alternative to the traditional map. Furthermore, this thesis work also compiled recommendations on how to produce navigation videos

A Privacy-Friendly Architecture for Mobile Social Networking Applications

The resources and localization abilities available in modern smartphones have provided a huge boost to the popularity of location-based applications. In these applications, users send their current locations to a central service provider and can receive content or an enhanced experience predicated on their provided location. Privacy issues with location- based applications can arise from a central entity being able to store large amounts of information about users (e.g., contact information, attributes) and locations (e.g., available businesses, users present). We propose an architecture for a privacy-friendly location hub to encourage the development of mobile location-based social applications with privacy- preserving features. Our primary goal is to store information such that no entity in our architecture can link a user’s identity to her location. We also aim to decouple storing data from manipulating data for social networking purposes. Other goals include designing an architecture flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases and avoiding considerable client-side computation. Our architecture consists of separate server components for storing information about users and storing information about locations, as well as client devices and optional com- ponents in the cloud for supporting applications. We describe the design of API functions exposed by the server components and demonstrate how they can be used to build some sample mobile location-based social applications. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided with in-depth descriptions of how each function was realized, as well as experi- ments examining the practicality of our architecture. Finally, we present two real-world applications developed on the Android platform to demonstrate how these applications work from a user’s perspective

Next generation analytics for open pervasive display networks

Public displays and digital signs are becoming increasingly widely deployed as many spaces move towards becoming highly interactive and augmented environments. Market trends suggest further significant increases in the number of digital signs and both researchers and commercial entities are working on designing and developing novel uses for this technology. Given the level of investment, it is increasingly important to be able to understand the effectiveness of public displays. Current state-of-the-art analytics technology is limited in the extent to which it addresses the challenges that arise from display deployments becoming open (increasing numbers of stakeholders), networked (viewer engagement across devices and locations) and pervasive (high density of displays and sensing technology leading to potential privacy threats for viewers). In this thesis, we provide the first exploration into achieving next generation display analytics in the context of open pervasive display networks. In particular, we investigated three areas of challenge: analytics data capture, reporting and automated use of analytics data. Drawing on the increasing number of stakeholders, we conducted an extensive review of related work to identify data that can be captured by individual stakeholders of a display network, and highlighted the opportunities for gaining insights by combining datasets owned by different stakeholders. Additionally, we identified the importance of viewer-centric analytics that use traditional display-oriented analytics data combined with viewer mobility patterns to produce entirely new sets of analytics reports. We explored a range of approaches to generating viewer-centric analytics including the use of mobility models as a way to create 'synthetic analytics' - an approach that provides highly detailed analytics whilst preserving viewer privacy. We created a collection of novel viewer-centric analytics reports providing insights into how viewers experience a large network of pervasive displays including reports regarding the effectiveness of displays, the visibility of content across the display network, and the visibility of content to viewers. We further identified additional reports specific to those display networks that support the delivery of personalised content to viewers. Additionally, we highlighted the similarities between digital signage and Web analytics and introduced novel forms of digital signage analytics reports created by leveraging existing Web analytics engines. Whilst the majority of analytics systems focus solely on the capture and reporting of analytics insights, we additionally explored the automated use of analytics data. One of the challenges in open pervasive display networks is accommodating potentially competing content scheduling constraints and requirements that originate from the large number of stakeholders - in addition to contextual changes that may originate from analytics insights. To address these challenges, we designed and developed the first lottery scheduling approach for digital signage providing a means to accommodate potentially conflicting scheduling constraints, and supporting context- and event-based scheduling based on analytics data fed back into the digital sign. In order to evaluate the set of systems and approaches presented in this thesis, we conducted large-scale, long-term trials allowing us to show both the technical feasibility of the systems developed and provide insights into the accuracy and performance of different analytics capture technologies. Our work provides a set of tools and techniques for next generation digital signage analytics and lays the foundation for more general people-centric analytics that go beyond the domain of digital signs and enable unique analytical insights and understanding into how users interact across the physical and digital world