ProD framework

The paper I read was about the ProD framework. The paper was written by Ben Congleton, Mark S. Ackerman, and Mark W. Newman of the University of Michigan. ProD is written in Ruby on Rails and is designed for use in public kiosks and other places where users can come and go. Proactive displays are machines that select its content based on the users that are present. The idea behind ProD is that the content being displayed is constantly changing based on the users that are present and also the choices the users have made. What drives ProD are the three P's: Presence, Processing, and Presentation. When users are identified as present via bluetooth, magnetic card, RFID, etc, a list of users is generated. That list is then passed through a governance module to determine which if any users take priority. The list is then populated with information stored about particular users. Users then select the type of content that they are interested in seeing. ProD then filters the list of users, relationships they may have, content preferences, etc and presents it on the screen.

ProD is a very interested concept that highlights the social relationships that can be formed through web services. Many examples were included in the paper which used services such as Flickr, Google Maps, Facebook, others. ProD bridges the gap between the social relationships that are formed online by presenting them in a digestable manner in the real world.