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The pervasiveness of public displays is prompting an increased need for “fresh” content to be shown, that is highly engaging and useful to passerbys. As such, live or time-sensitive content is often shown in conjunction with “traditional” static content, which creates scheduling challenges. In this work, we propose a utility-based framework that can be used to represent the usefulness of a content item over time. We develop a novel scheduling algorithm for handling live and non-live content on public displays using our utility-based framework. We experimentally evaluate our proposed algorithm against a number of alternatives under a variety of workloads; the results show that our algorithm performs well on the proposed metrics. Additional experimental evaluation shows that our utility-based framework can handle changes in priorities and deadlines of content items, without requiring any involvement by the display owner beyond the initial setup. 

In this paper, we describe the implementation of an information sharing platform, got-toilet-paper.com. We create this web page in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to help the Pittsburgh, PA community share information about congestion and product shortages in supermarkets. We show that the public good problem of the platform makes it difficult for the platform to operate. In particular, there is sizable demand for the information, but supply satis es only a small fraction of demand. We provide a theoretical model and show that the first best outcomes cannot be obtained in a free market and the best symmetric equilibrium outcome decreases as the number of participant increases. Also, the best symmetric equilibrium has two problems, cost inefficiency and positive probability of termination. We discuss two potential solutions. The first is a uniform random sharing mechanism, which implies randomly selecting one person every period who will be responsible for information sharing. It is ex-post individually rational but hard to implement. The second solution is the one that we began implementing. It implies selecting a person at the beginning and make her responsible to share information every period, while reimbursing her cost. We discuss the reasons for high demand and low supply both qualitatively and quantitatively. 

The pervasiveness of public displays is prompting an increased need for "fresh" content to be shown, that is highly engaging and useful to passerbys. As such, live or time-sensitive content is often shown in conjunction with "traditional" static content, which creates scheduling challenges. In this work, we propose a utility-based framework and a novel scheduling algorithm for handling live and non-live content on public displays. We also experimentally evaluate our proposed algorithm against a number of alternatives under a variety of workloads.