SBIR Phase I: Dynamic Product Experience Protocol and Marketplace

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to create a platform where content creators can upload digital content and retailers can easily integrate and get curated product content. Moreover, such a platform should give the opportunity to brick-and-mortar stores to create on the fly e-stores (buy-online, pick-up in store). Such a platform will bring a new supply side capability to e-commerce that will serve to enhance competition. The proposed innovation provides data robustness and relevance to the retail industry. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to create a decentralized e-commerce infrastructure allowing retailers to access and deliver trusted, rich product data content across all digital channels. This project will advance a decentralized Dynamic Product Experience Protocol and Marketplace (DPXM) to create a comprehensive digital product data catalog, to be validated through a Proof-of-Quality (PoQ) consensus algorithm. This project’s goal is the optimization of the PoQ algorithm to generate random graphs and temporal random networks to accommodate for a continuously expanding network, to prevent copyright and IP infringements, the clustering of hostile agents to impose specific content that benefits them and to ensure the fairness of agent selection and payment. The algorithm will adjust the parameters needed to compute the trustworthiness scores of the participating agents. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.