Management of Context for Smartphone-based Marketing for Brick & Mortar Retailers

Smartphones are not only incredibly powerful computing devices, but also sophisticated sensor platforms. Leveraging sensed user context, such as location, to provide targeted advertising has been discussed as a potential application of ubiquitous sensing in the literature, and is beginning to appear in industrial applications. In this proposal we describe the innovations necessary to realize context-sensitive advertising in a traditional brick and mortar store, where user-specific offers are pulled from a server when the phone determines that the user is likely about to shop at a particular store. This innovation will require research and development in ubiquitous systems, sensor data analysis and human computer interaction. The final product will be an innovative and competitive system that will provide College Mobile with an ongoing competitive advantage in supplying brick and mortar companies with user-specific smartphone advertising solutions. Investigating this challenging problem will advance user modeling and small-screen interaction research.

Faculty Supervisor:

Drs. Kevin G. Stanley & Carl Gutwin

Student:

Amin Tavassolian

Partner:

College Mobile Inc.

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of Saskatchewan