SOCIALLY-AWARE SYSTEMS TO PRESENT CONTENT IN

PERVASIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Fernando Ribeiro and José Metrôlho

Informatics Department, Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, Castelo Branco, Portugal

Keywords: Adaptive systems, Ambient intelligence, Context-aware applications, Public displays, Pervasive advertising,

Public recommender systems, Socially-aware computing, Ubiquitous computing.

Abstract: Services relevance is strictly connected to the environment in which they are provided and one service that

is highly relevant in a particular environment can be a completely inappropriate service in a different

context or in a different environment. To provide relevant and appropriate services, the systems should be

aware of their environment, the needs and interests of users and should adapt their behaviour to the specific

needs of each particular place and each particular set of users’ current interests. The combination of users’

personal interactions to build the social context of a public place represents an important support to allow

services adaptiveness and thus adjust systems behaviour to best fit users’ needs and space characteristics.

This paper provides an overview of some aspects that involve the combination of personal interactions to

build socially-aware systems. It also describes two experiments, where social context was used to improve

services usefulness. Results indicate that this combination can represent an important aspect to be

considered in the way to provide users with novel, relevant and suitable services.

1 INTRODUCTION

Ubiquitous computing vision foresees a world where

computing solutions and communication services are

available everywhere and at all time. Achieving this,

entails a new generation of computing systems,

where the environment is continuously sensed and

systems adapt their behaviour to the continuously

changing characteristics of the environment. Only

then it is possible to provide services that fit the

users’ needs and that can help them in their day-to-

day tasks without being too obstructive. In the

broadcasting of content to people in public spaces,

e.g. ads, advices or simply some informative

content, the selection of suitable ways to deliver the

content is central to improve the efficiency of the

system. This is why many advertisers and content

publishers are constantly struggling to find the best

advertising strategies to promote their services. They

need to be able to reach the target population that is

potentially interested in their products or services

and they need to deliver the content properly in

order to capture users' attention. On the other hand,

the dissemination of large displays and mobile

computing devices has created new opportunities for

the joined use of these devices, which allows us to

foresee a range of new applications that can go far

beyond what is supported today, that is essentially in

using these displays for cyclically presenting

advertising or broadcasting information of local

interest. These devices can enrich public spaces

providing users with relevant information and giving

advertisers new opportunities to promote their

products or services. However, promoting ads in

these scenarios requires different strategies from the

ones that are used in traditional media like

newspapers, radio, TV, e-mail, etc., or even from

online ads or traditional notification services where

users subscribe some type of services or drive their

search for content they want. In public spaces the

content is mainly pushed to the users by the

promoters, hoping that it will fit the users’ interests.

In this paper we provide an overview of some

challenges that involve the selection of appropriate

ads in public spaces and we describe two

experiments where personal interactions are used to

support socially-aware content selection and to

improve services usefulness. Early results indicate

that this can be an interesting approach to the

problem of providing users with novel, relevant and

suitable services in public spaces.

254

Ribeiro F. and Metrôlho J..

SOCIALLY-AWARE SYSTEMS TO PRESENT CONTENT IN PERVASIVE ENVIRONMENTS.

DOI: 10.5220/0003825102540257

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Pervasive Embedded Computing and Communication Systems (PECCS-2012), pages 254-257

ISBN: 978-989-8565-00-6

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2 CHALLENGES

There are many challenges when developing

systems for advertising in ubiquitous computing

environments that are not usually found when

developing advertising systems for traditional media

or online advertising. The particularities of these

environments make them very rich in interaction

mechanisms and create new opportunities for several

innovative applications but, at the same time, many

other additional difficulties should be considered.

Some of them are pointed out by (Muller et al.,

2009); (Partridge and Begole 2009) namely: the way

advertisers specify and bid on ads; the extra

complexity of processing contextual information and

how to use this information in an appropriate way;

serendipitous advertisings, privacy and security.

Others could be added: the difficulty in obtaining

information on the interests of the target audience or

how to get user feedback on each presented ad.

Globally, these challenges are not related with the

lack of content but with two central questions: how

to deliver the right content to the right people? and

how to deliver the right content in the best context.

2.1 Delivering the Right Content to the

Right People

How to deliver ads to people who are potentially

interested? How to capture users’ attention? It is not

possible to answer these questions without knowing

something about the users’ interests or activities.

Only being aware of the users’ needs the system will

be able to respond accurately and according to their

expectations. However, interactions in public spaces

should be conducted effortless and potentially

demand little or no prior training. Additionally, in

public spaces, it is important to consider that the

content is targeted to a large audience instead of a

person and thus rather than having a person profile

we need a profile that combines the preferences of

the multiple users that may see the content.

2.2 The Best Context

It is well known that the relevance of a particular

content is strictly connected with the target

population and with the context where it will be

delivered. An ad can be highly relevant in a business

place but it is totally misplaced and without

relevance if it is delivered in a school. An ad can be

very relevant in a time period before lunch but lost

its entire relevance after lunch. However, delivering

the content at the right time is not only about hours

or minutes. The main question is how to figure the

best possible time and the best possible context to

deliver the ad. The set of contextual information that

can be used to improve content selection accuracy in

public spaces is vast. Information concerning the

social environment, the physical and social space,

available devices to deliver the content, time, and

also the views history can play an important role in

the selections of the next content to be presented. A

better use of contextual information can allow

pervasive advertising to be more effective and can

also better fit to the interests of the target population

but also the interests of the advertisers/publishers.

3 RELATED WORK

Several advertisements systems that adopt pervasive

computing technologies have been presented and

discussed in recent years. A significant part of them

are proposed to deliver online ads (Edelman et al.,

2007); (Googl inc. 2011) but some of them have

been built to deliver context-aware ads in public

places. (Partridge and Begole 2009); (Orsi, 2011)

use mobile phones as the main device to display ads

and other. Other systems explore public devices, like

large displays, in public spaces combined with

personal mobile device to understand users’ interests

and activities and thus to deliver ads for groups of

people instead of a person. (Partridge and Begole

2009) explore how can histories of contextual data

help target advertising more effectively. The

BlueScreen (Payne et al., 2006) uses Bluetooth-

enable devices for identifying users and it explores

history information of past users’ exposure to certain

sets of adverts. (Holleis et al., 2010) combine public

screens and mobile devices and explores personal

user profiles and explicit input from users in order to

provide appropriate ads. They use the users’ mobile

phones to store information about their owners, track

their activities, and let them interact directly with the

display. There are many proposed systems that try to

provide personalized ads to individuals or for

recommending content to people in public spaces

but few of them base their decisions in the social

context that represents the place visitors’ interests.

4 SELECTING ADS

When developing systems to delivering ads in public

spaces, there are two viewpoints that should be taken

into consideration: the advertiser viewpoint and the

SOCIALLY-AWARE SYSTEMS TO PRESENT CONTENT IN PERVASIVE ENVIRONMENTS

255

consumer viewpoint. While the viewpoint of the

advertiser is easily to include in the system

behaviour using relatively simple contextual rules,

including the consumer viewpoint could be a

complex task.

4.1 Social Interests of the Audience

We build a social characterization of the public

space using information from personal interactions.

Each user is associated to a bag of tags that represent

its past interactions. Tags that are used more recently

are associated to higher weights. The system also

distinguishes between users that are currently in the

space on users that already leave the space giving

higher weights to present users. All these

information is combined into a dynamic social

model of the place. The social model is combined

with a set of contextual rules that characterize each

ad to decide what and when to present a specific ad.

4.2 Ads

When create an ad, there are essentially two aspects

to be considered. The content and its appearance that

should be chosen to attract users’ attention and the

preferable contextual conditions in which each ad

should be selected. The first aspect requires special

attention from the design viewpoint and it is not the

focus of this work. The second aspect is a central

question in the selection process. It represents the

advertiser viewpoint of the preferable conditions

under which the ad gets more added value. In this

case the advertiser may define a set of contextual

rules per each which include rules about: time,

weather, category, a set of associated keywords,

location and the number of times to be presented.

5 EXPERIMENTS

Both systems described in next subsections were

developed with the main goal of delivering

appropriate information for people in public spaces.

Both use information acquired from user mobile

devices interactions in the form of tags (Bluetooth

and NFC) to build socially-aware systems and to

support their decisions about what is the best ad to

be delivered at each time.

5.1 Public Ads with Bluetooth

In this system we explore Bluetooth capabilities as a

medium to express users’ interests. Users express

their interests defining a profile in the system or

spontaneously interacting with the system using

keywords in their Bluetooth device name to specify

their interests. Using Bluetooth scanners with

different ranges, the system differentiates two types

of interaction zones: a mobile zone and a display

zone. This is used to identify the user location and

thus to select the most appropriate device to deliver

the information. When he is detected within the

display zone his profile and his interactions are

processed conjunctly with profiles and interactions

of other users in the space and they are processed to

support decisions on the next content to be presented

in the public display.

5.1.1 Selecting Content

The first task is to decide if every ad can be

presented in the public display or if the ad is not

classified as public and thus it should be delivered

only to the users’ personal mobile device. In the

mobile zone the system delivers new pending ads for

registered users according to their profiles. In the

display zone, if there are no Bluetooth devices the

display presents cyclically available public ads

according to the social context. If there are

registered devices the display presents ads related to

the profiles and general content. If there are explicit

interactions (using keywords in the Bluetooth device

name) the system searches for related ads (related to

the topic of the keyword).

5.1.2 Evaluation and Results

After 3-weeks of experiment, the system detected

103 distinct mobile devices and 23 of them are

registered in the system. The ratio of detected

devices that received messages was 22.3%. During

this period the system delivered 62 personal

messages, corresponding to 14 distinct messages, to

23 distinct students. After the experimental period,

we’ve asked the users to fill a questionnaire where

they were able to express their opinion. More than

73% of them refer that the system presents some

benefits over common online software to support

students/teachers interaction.

5.2 Public Ads with NFC

Using NFC as interaction mechanism, users are able

to explicitly express their interests in a particular

moment. This allows the user to directly access to

the desired information using his mobile device but,

at the same time, the combination of the multiple

interactions of the users allow characterizing the

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space interests, in the form of a social profile, and

thus presenting in a public display ads in which

other people might be interested in. This allows

delivering to people in the place the ads that are

representative of the interests of people who attend

the same space and thus possibly with similar

interests.

Figure 1: Public Ads with NFC.

5.2.1 Selecting Ads

The system architecture can be seen in Figure 1.

Each NFC tag is associated to a category of ads

(food, clothes, shoes, etc.). By reading the NFC tag

the user could access to a web page with a list of ads

with a short summary (the user may select each

specific ad and read more information) that are

related to the category in the NFC tag. To select the

next ad to be presented in the public display we

realize a matching between the ad, contextual rules

and the real context (social context), and we use the

presentation history to avoid the presentation of the

same ad too often.

5.2.2 Evaluation and Results

We have run a preliminary evaluation with four

users to provide a better insight into the system,

which may identify new issues/problems to consider,

and to obtain initial feedback on users’ acceptance

and perception of the system main features. The

prototype includes a smart poster with three distinct

NFC tags and a display that presents content related

to the place interests. The system includes 5 ads

within each category (NFC tag) which totals 15 ads.

All users referred that the usability of the system

as a strength. However, three of them referred that

they did not have associated the behaviour of the

display to their interactions. This may be related to

the time period in which the users stay in front of the

display (because the display does not respond

immediately to the users’ interactions in order not to

denounce their actions and preserve their privacy)

but can also mean that some adjustments may be

needed in the behaviour of the display.

6 CONCLUSIONS

We propose an approach that combines public

displays and personal mobile devices for delivering

relevant content in public spaces. It combines tags

from personal interactions to build a social context

of the public space and uses this information to

deliver appropriate content to people in public

spaces. We run two experiments based on those

principles. Initial evaluation results suggest that the

combination of public displays and tag-based

interactions from personal mobile devices represent

an interesting combination to provide relevant and

personalized information for users in public spaces.

Currently we are working in different algorithms

for representing the social context and for improving

the content selection in the public display. We are

analysing: include more information on the

algorithm; contextualize users’ interactions

(location, organizational context) giving a

contextualized sense to the users interactions and

defining an economic model that appropriately

represents the added value of intentional interactions

and social context.

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Edelman, B. B., M. Ostrovsky, et al., (2007). “Internet

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Googl inc., (2011). Online Advertising by Google, Online:

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Holleis, P., G. Broll, et al., (2010). Advertising with NFC

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Muller, J., P. Holleis, et al., (2009). Pervasive Advertising.

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Payne, T., E. David, et al., (2006). Auction Mechanisms

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