BluScreen Appears in New Scientist

12/09/2006

BluScreen

Within a ubiquitous environment, market-based approaches can be used to select the most appropriate material for a public display, depending on factors such as the audience's preferences and diversity of interest. Likewise, strategies used by agents to compete for customer attention should strive to be rational, based on contextual observations of user-preferences within the local environment, and should include a reward mechanism based on audience responses. Ubiquitous devices such as bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, can be used to uniquely identify and detect the presence of individuals within a localised environment, without the need for deploying bespoke hardware.

BluScreen, developed by Dr Terry R. Payne at the University of Southampton, is an auction-based framework for presenting consumer advertisements is described, whereby agents (representing consumer advertisements) can compete for consumer attention, where consumer interest is determined through observations of ambient bluetooth activity.

Update

This work is ongoing, and has been looking at some of the issues to do with evaluation, as well as considering alternate mechanisms for selecting adverts.  Publications arising from this work are listed below...

2007

Karam, M., Payne, T. R. and David, E. (2007) Evaluating BluScreen: Usability for Intelligent Pervasive Displays. In: The Second IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Applications (ICPCA '07), July 26-27, Birmingham, UK.

Rogers, A., David, E., Payne, T. R. and Jennings, N. R. (2007) An Advanced Bidding Agent for Advertisement Selection on Public Displays. In: Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-07), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

2006

Payne, T. R., David, E., Jennings, N. R. and Sharifi, M. (2006) Auction Mechanisms for Efficient Advertisement Selection on Public Displays (Extended Abstract). In: Fourth European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems, 14-15th December, Lisbon, Portugal.

Payne, T. R., David, E., Jennings, N. R. and Sharifi, M. (2006) Auction Mechanisms for efficient Advertisment Selection on Public Display. In: European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 28th-September 1st 2006, Trentino.

2005

Payne, T. R., Sharifi, M. and Belecheanu, R. (2005) Ontologies for Tracking Ubiquitous Interest. In: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC).