Scheduling Interactive and Concurrently Running Applications on a Network of Open Public Displays

You are cordially invited to attend the PhD Dissertation Defense of Ivan ELHART on Friday, May 29th 2015 at 09h30 in room A33 (Red building)

Abstract:
Today’s digital signage systems typically show content that has been scheduled well in advance by their respective owners. 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 significantly. We envision that displays in our environment will soon be able to dynamically adapt to their surroundings and allow viewers to appropriate them by actively selecting and contributing content through public display applications.

Display application scheduling is an important factor in opening up currently closed and non-interactive public displays. Starting from the scheduling requirements in digital signage systems, the goal of my research is to design and develop a scheduling framework for open public displays and a software component for scheduling interactive and concurrently running display applications on a network of open public displays using dynamic scheduling policies and metaheuristics.

The thesis presents a notation and framework for describing scheduling problems in open display networks. By following the structure of the scheduling notation, I designed and developed a modular web-based scheduling component that can dynamically schedule interactive and concurrently running applications on pervasive displays. The scheduling component has been evaluated in the context of a long-term university deployment through quantitative and qualitative data analysis. The results show that the developed scheduling component can support diverse scheduling requirements, provide a flexible control to display owners, as well as allow display viewers to dynamically influence application scheduling and gain control over public displays during short interactions.

Dissertation Committee:

• Prof. Marc Langheinrich, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland (Research Advisor)
• Prof. Antonio Carzaniga, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland (Internal Member)
• Prof. Fabio Crestani, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland (Internal Member)
• Prof. Nigel Davies, Lancaster University, UK (External Member)
• Prof. Antonio Krüger, German Research Center for AI (DFKI), Germany (External Member)