SciFly - Customised Flyers on Demand

Methods: SciFly is a demonstration system that generates customised flyers about CSIRO’s research in Information and Communication Technologies, based on user-selected areas of interest. It has been designed to operate as a touch-screen information kiosk, but also has a web-interface to allow remote, browser-based interaction. In response to a user nominating their areas of interest, SciFly dynamically gathers and assembles relevant content into a flyer. SciFly also adds relevant contact information, web links and higher level context, all of which is tailored to support the information presented. This process is controlled using the flexible planning capabilities of our Myriad delivery platform (see Paris et al. [2] for details). The automatically generated flyers are modelled on existing manually authored flyers. These manual flyers are professionally authored and pre-printed in bulk, and as such are static and expensive to update. To inform the content and presentation of our automatically tailored flyers, a corpus analysis of human-authored flyers was performed to understand both their structure and content. This knowledge is encoded in the rules that configure the Myriad planning engine, which controls both the retrieval and delivery of information. The assembled information for each flyer is structured according to the rhetorical relations that exist between segments of text, as described by Mann & Thompson [1]. Importantly, SciFly does not just present pre-configured content, but dynamically adjusts the amount and detail of content based on the range of topics selected, the structure of the information to be presented and the constraints of the delivery medium. In particular, the rhetorical structure information allows SciFly to ensure that the information presented remains coherent and consistent even when adapted to the available space and different output devices.