Key challenges in application and content scheduling for Open Pervasive Display Networks

Today’s digital signage systems typically show content that has been scheduled well in advance by their respective “owners”, i.e., companies or individuals who paid for and/or operate the public display. However, with the shift to open display networks that can obtain content from many sources and the corresponding advances in interaction and sensing technologies, the scheduling requirements in this domain are set to change radically. For example, we envision that displays in our environment will soon be able to adapt to their surroundings and allow viewers to appropriate them by actively selecting and/or contributing content. Such levels of interactivity and context-awareness will require new approaches to content scheduling. In this paper we discuss the challenges faced in developing new forms of application and content scheduling for Open Pervasive Display Networks.(undefined

Audience monitor:an open source tool for tracking audience mobility in front of pervasive displays

Understanding an audience's behavior is an important aspect of evaluating display installations. In particular, it is important to understand how people move around in the vicinity of displays, including viewer transitions from noticing a display, through approach, to final use of the display. Despite the importance of measuring viewer mobility patterns, there are still relatively few low-cost tools that can be used with research display deployments to capture detailed spatial and temporal behavior of an audience. In this paper, we present an approach to audience monitoring that uses an off-the-shelf depth sensor and open source computer vision algorithms to monitor the space in front of a digital display, tracking presence and movements of both passers-by and display users. We believe that our approach can help display researchers evaluate their public display deployments and improve the level of quantitative data underpinning our field

A good balance of costs and benefits: convincing a university administration to support the installation of an interactive multi-application display system on campus

Interactive digital signage systems allow passers-by to take (temporary) control of a public display in order to select content and applications of interest, or even upload content of their own. Not surprisingly, display owners are hesitant to embrace such interactivity, given the uncertainty of what will be shown on their displays. In this paper we summarize our experience of deploying an interactive multi-application display system in the context of a university environment, and in particular our engagements with display owners (i.e., university administration) in order to convince them and get their support for the installation and deployment of such a system. We present the results of semi-structured interviews with display owners regarding their motivations, needs, and concerns with respect to the deployment of such a system at our university. While one cannot generalize from our results, we nevertheless believe that our experiences offer helpful advice to developers of such systems (and/or researchers interested in designing and studying them) in order to aid them in successfully gathering the support of these important stakeholders

Design and implementation of a new run-time life-cycle for interactive public display applications

Public display systems are becoming increasingly complex. They are moving from passive closed systems to open interactive systems that are able to accommodate applications from several independent sources. This shift needs to be accompanied by a more flexible and powerful application management. In this paper, we propose a run-time life-cycle model for interactive public display applications that addresses several shortcomings of current display systems. Our model allows applications to load their resources before they are displayed, enables the system to quickly pause and resume applications, provides strategies for applications to transition and terminate gracefully by requesting additional time to finish the presentation of content, allows applications to save their state before being destroyed and gives applications the opportunity to request and relinquish display time. We have implemented our model as a Google Chrome extension that allows any computer with the Google Chrome browser to become a public display driver without further software. In this paper we present our model, implementation, and evaluation of the system

Developing a networked public display system

Engaging stakeholders in the design of networked public display systems is critical for long-term deployments. The authors describe the three-year development and installation of a display network at a university, revealing the fuzziness of stakeholder roles and need for compromise

Prime: A framework for co-located multi-device apps

Even though mobile devices are ubiquitous, the conceptually simple endeavor of using co-located devices for multi-user experiences is cumbersome. It may not even be possible when certain apps are not widely available. We introduce Prime, a thin-client framework for colocated multi-device apps (MDAs). It leverages wellestablished remote display protocols to enable spontaneous use of MDAs. One device acts as a host, executing the app on behalf of connected clients. The key challenges is dynamic scalability: providing high framerates, low latency and fairness across clients. Therefore, we have developed: An online scheduling algorithm that provides frame rate, latency and fairness guarantees; a modified 802.11 MAC protocol that provides low-latency and fairness; and an efficient video encoder pipeline that offers up to fourteen times higher framerates. We show that Prime can scale a host up to seven concurrent players for a commercially released open source action game, achieving touch-To-pixel latency below 100ms for all clients

Leveraging simulation practice in industry through use of desktop grid middleware

This chapter focuses on the collaborative use of computing resources to support decision making in industry. Through the use of middleware for desktop grid computing, the idle CPU cycles available on existing computing resources can be harvested and used for speeding-up the execution of applications that have “non-trivial” processing requirements. This chapter focuses on the desktop grid middleware BOINC and Condor, and discusses the integration of commercial simulation software together with free-to-download grid middleware so as to offer competitive advantage to organizations that opt for this technology. It is expected that the low-intervention integration approach presented in this chapter (meaning no changes to source code required) will appeal to both simulation practitioners (as simulations can be executed faster, which in turn would mean that more replications and optimization is possible in the same amount of time) and the management (as it can potentially increase the return on investment on existing resources)

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Design considerations for application selection and control in multi-user public displays

Urban spaces are increasingly embedded with various types of public digital displays. Many of these displays can be subject to multi-user interactions and support a broad range of applications. A fundamental implication emerging from the interactive nature of those applications is that users should have access to appropriate selection and control techniques that would allow them to drive the way applications are shown and used in the respective environment. Such techniques should enable each user to reason and express intentions about the system behavior, while also dealing with concurrent requests from multiple users in a way that is fair and clear. In this study, we aim to inform the definition of novel techniques for application selection and control in pervasive display environments that can address the above challenges. Drawing inspiration from traditional GUI interaction concepts we developed and deployed a public display system that supports multiple applications and is able to receive explicit content presentation requests from multiple viewers. Based on the experiment observations and interviews with the participants, we reached a set of design considerations for future pervasive displays environments that are open to third party applications providers and allow the audience to influence content presentation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Grid Analysis of Radiological Data

IGI-Global Medical Information Science Discoveries Research Award 2009International audienceGrid technologies and infrastructures can contribute to harnessing the full power of computer-aided image analysis into clinical research and practice. Given the volume of data, the sensitivity of medical information, and the joint complexity of medical datasets and computations expected in clinical practice, the challenge is to fill the gap between the grid middleware and the requirements of clinical applications. This chapter reports on the goals, achievements and lessons learned from the AGIR (Grid Analysis of Radiological Data) project. AGIR addresses this challenge through a combined approach. On one hand, leveraging the grid middleware through core grid medical services (data management, responsiveness, compression, and workflows) targets the requirements of medical data processing applications. On the other hand, grid-enabling a panel of applications ranging from algorithmic research to clinical use cases both exploits and drives the development of the services