Context-aware advertising is one of the most critical components in the Internet ecosystem today because most WWW publisher’s revenue highly depends on the relevance of the displayed advertisement to the context of the user interaction. Existing research works in context-aware advertising mainly focus on analyzing either the content of the web page (in which it is also called contextual advertising), or the keywords of the user search. However, we have identified the limitations of these works when being extended into mobile web, which has become a major platform for users to access Internet with thanks to the new lightweight web technologies and the development of mobile devices. These mobile devices are equipped with networking capabilities and sensors that provide versatile contexts including physical environment, user internal and social community. These contexts, which are far beyond just page content and search keywords, should be well organized and utilized for online advertising to gain better user experience and reaction. In this chapter, we point out the aforementioned limitations of the existing works in context-aware advertising when being applied for mobile platforms. We also discuss the characteristics of the contexts that are available on mobile devices and clearly describe the challenges of utilizing these contexts to optimize the advertisement on mobile platforms. We then present a context-aware advertising framework that collects and integrates the user contexts to select, generate, and present advertising content. The purpose of this framework is to provide the mobile users with targeted and purposeful advertisement. Finally, we discuss the implementation aspects and one specific application of this framework and outline our future plans.
Context-awareness for control consoles in integrated operating rooms
