Activity-based advertising: techniques and challenges

Although information technology has transformed advertising dramatically in the past few years, the greatest changes may lie in the future. Researchers in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing have spent the last few years prototyping and studying context-aware systems. These systems use sensors on mobile phones and in the infrastructure to build digital models of the world. This technology has not yet achieved commercial success in advertising applications, but has great potential. In this paper we describe three types of activity-based advertising: 1) inferring general interest categories, 2) adapting advertising to the current context, and 3) using contextual histories to predict the future and adapt present advertising to these predictions.