Patent Application
20150312277
All material in this document, including the figures, is subject to copyright protections under the laws of the United States and other countries. The owner has no objection to the reproduction of this document or its disclosure as it appears in official governmental records. All other rights are reserved.
The present invention relates generally to telecommunications, digital communication, computer security, computer technology, mobile computing.
Recent years have brought the emergence and rapid proliferation of mobile computing devices such as mobile telephones or “handsets” with extensive computing, communication, and input and interaction capabilities (“smart phones”) plus a growing array of other mobile computing devices such as touchscreen tablets, “netbooks”, electronic document readers, and laptops in a wide range of sizes and with wireless and wired communication capabilities. This proliferation of mobile devices has been accompanied by complementary advances in development and adoption of long-range wireless broadband technologies such as 3G and 4G, as well as commonplace deployment of shorter-range wireless technologies such as the 802.11 series of wireless standards and “Bluetooth” short-range wireless, all with considerable bandwidth. These technologies span multiple radio frequency bands and protocols. Alongside the radio transceivers for such communications capabilities, many of these devices also contain an array of onboard sensors such as cameras, microphones, and GPS receivers plus other locating technologies, as well as considerable fixed-onboard and removable memory for information and multimedia storage. Furthermore, smartphones and similar devices are typically capable of running a wide variety of software applications such as browsers, e-mail clients, media players, and other applications, which in some cases may be installed by the user. New devices with Internet connectivity, such as various sensors and internet-connected household appliances are becoming available, forming a broadly connected “Internet of Things”.
Along with the profusion of smartphones and other mobile, wireless-capable devices, there has also been a dramatic increase in the use of social networks and related technologies for information sharing for consumer as well as for professional uses. Furthermore, the possible professional and personal use of any given handset presents a complex set of usage contexts under which rules for device capability usage and information access need be considered. Such sophisticated devices and the complex network scenarios that they operate in provide new opportunities for sophisticated system for information anon selection and presentation. Current contextual news presentation services such as Google Now http://www.goggle.ca/landing/now/ and Bing News http://www.bing.com/news/ are capable of presenting news such as traffic conditions and weather alerts to a given computing device in the context of parameters such as device location, filtered by user preferences. However, there exist substantial opportunities for a more broadly capable, secure information selection and presentation system with granular control of presented information in accordance with expressed requirements of multiple stakeholders, such as device users, emergency services groups, network operators, corporate governors, and regulatory bodies.
The invention pertains to a system and method to display content, including data and messaging, based on a secure, policy-managed set of instructions for selecting, distributing, and presenting information on a device. The system accepts one or more streams of data in any digital form from one or more data sources. The content is assessed via a set of policy instructions that may include time, location, hierarchy of ownership, type of content, assessed importance of content, and display availability. Only approved content is transmitted to the device for display.
The system receives policy instructions from one or more sources that are processed to determine priority and applicability to the content. The content is then evaluated by the policy instructions to determine what content will or will not be transmitted to the device for display. The system is suitable for any type of display. The content can be temporarily serialized and stored in a database for offline processing. The policy instructions can be used to specify time-dependent content, location-dependent content, or can specify conditions by which the device interface is configured.
The present invention is a secure, policy-managed content selection and presentation system for selecting, distributing, and presenting information on computing devices. The policy-managed display is a system consisting of an application or other executing entity or component thereof, running on a computing device and presenting selected information or other content on a display or other output device associated with that computing device, and having the selection of the presented information from one or more content sources performed through the application of rules expressed and organized within a policy-based content selection system. Such a content selection system may have a hierarchy of policy owners, for determining precedence of policy application, and may also include a method of ranking or prioritizing individual content items to be shown, given that the size of the display area will generally be constrained. One such policy-based system that could be utilized to perform the required content selection is that presented in international patent application PCT/US13/78004 ('004) the disclosure of which is included by reference as if fully set forth herein.
In the case that the content presentation is accomplished via a visual display, the physical display area being managed may be all or a portion of the available electronic display area on the computing device itself, or of some other external display coupled to the device by wired or wireless means. An alternative or supplementary form of presentation of the selected content would be through the use of audio notifications, either via recorded audio transmissions or synthesized speech (text-to-speech conversion), or, some form of alarm sound or warning tone.
Another alternative form of presentation or notification of content is through the use of variations in adjustments to elastic or other transducers that can then cause a human to react. Such transducers might be mounted or otherwise located within clothing such as socks, shirts, trousers, or underwear, or attached to glasses or hats.
Hardcopy output of the managed display content to a device such as a printer is also contemplated by the invention, and may also be specified by policy. In the case of electronic display, the programmed form of the managed displaying entity may be a widget, applet, tile, application window, desktop or some near-equivalent to these presentation forms, rendered on an end point device or potentially on a customizable notification screen. Non-limiting examples of devices on which the display presentation could be made include a TV. PC, tablet, mobile phone, electronic timepiece, electronic billboard, or public news display screen.
The present invention also contemplates any other forms of output as the means of information presentation that is controlled by policy. Other specific, non-limiting examples include potential presentation devices such as implanted or otherwise human-proximal devices such as hearing aids, inner ear transducers, wearable optical outputting devices such as Google Glass, pressure transducers, or retinal display.
While the system and techniques described herein are notably applicable to mobile handsets, it is also the case that much of what is described can be applied to other areas of information selection and presentation. Neither the description nor the examples used in this present document should be taken as limiting the generality or the applicability of the system and the techniques presented to mobile handsets and wireless networks specifically, although they are immediately applicable in those areas.
The application would display content gathered from at least one source, and potentially from many, disparate local and/or external sources. Apart from common internet-accessible sources such as news sites and news feeds, data to be displayed may also be sourced from other devices and sensors, such as a nearby phone, temperature sensor or traffic flow level indicator. The presence of a known phone could be used to indicate and display the presence of a co-worker. A high temperature reading from a device of a nearby firefighting team member could be the source for a displayed emergency alert. The specific information and/or the format that the information is shown to the user would be based on rules contained within policy and those rules may incorporate use of specific contextual data from the device, and/or from other sources, with the contextual information then being used within policies for content selection. As one non-limiting example of such contextual data, device location data obtained from onboard GPS sensors might be used within a policy for deciding on the display of local weather or local emergency information. As a second non-limiting example, the enable/disabled status of a device-borne sensor such as a camera or microphone might be used within a decision to display a privacy or security related warning message in the policy-managed display of the device.
One embodiment of the present invention utilizes the Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) and Policy Decision Point (PDP) architecture that Sequitur Labs has previously disclosed in U.S. application Ser. No. 13/945,677, the disclosure of which is incorporated as if fully set forth herein, for the purposes of providing the means of policy specification and decision computation, access and control of contextual data sources such as device-borne sensors, and the secure content dissemination to the managed display. The present display application in this embodiment is therefore an extension of that core technology.
Policies can also be utilized to control not only the content of the display, but also to prescribe formatting and layout of the content to be presented. For example, individual formatting elements such as character sizes and line spacing may be dynamically specified by policy decisions to cause visible highlighting of high priority information, or to optimize the available display area. Such formatting specification could be expressed, in the case of HTML content, in the form of dynamically written cascading style sheets (CSS) defined from policy and supporting contextual information. Other content display attributes such as paging, scrolling controls and scrolling rates, and content navigation controls may also be defined and decided upon from policy, and then communicated to the device.
The display of information on the receiving device may be time-dependent, and updates may be triggered by events on the device or elsewhere. For example, an “unlock” of the device from a gesture such as a finger swipe or button press may trigger a request from the device to the PDP server, for new content to be displayed. Conversely, policy may express that notification of a major news event or emergency be “pushed” to the device from the PDP server, or that news presentation be refreshed at specific times of day or at specific intervals.
One non-limiting example of such a presentation of emergency alert information is illustrated in
A second non-limiting example of our invention, using data local to the device, combined with policy housed in the PDP, is a scheduled event alert coupled with location information, is presented in
Many application areas exist for our invention. The following is a non-limiting list of application examples. In some cases, policy is utilized to link together related content from distinct sources:
This application is entitled to the benefit of, and claims priority to U.S. Provisional Application 61/937,749, filed on Feb. 10, 2014.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 61937749 | Feb 2014 | US |
