Prototyped an application to show reminders on public displays that are aware of users around it
Highlights
Tools:Ruby on Rails, Attention Meter, jQuery, and SVN
Team Blog
Instructor: Mark Ackerman
Course: SI791 Independent Study (Winter’2009)
Teammates:Ben Congleton, Hung Troung, David Hutchful & Perry Wong
Challenge
Large public screens are becoming pervasive. It is common to see them in reception areas, hallways, train stations, and other public places. At the same time, people around these displays carry portable devices like smart phones. Our team was formed around the idea of making interesting applications by making the public display aware of the people around it.
My project
I developed a public display application, using Ruby on Rails, to display context-based reminders. The application is used to display non-invasive reminders on public displays. I’m interested in personal productivity systems like calendars, to-do lists, etc. I wanted to develop a reminder system with minimal overhead to the users.
How it works
The application accepts reminders from users via email. The application reads the email and applies natural language processing on the subject line to get the details (time, venue, title) about the reminder. The application constantly polls the context server (in the Prospero framework) for list of users near the public display. When a user is detected near the display, the application gets the reminders for that user from the database and cycles through all the reminders to that user.
Result
Our project received the second prize for Social Computing projects at the SI Exposition 2008 .