Dr Theodoros N Arvanitis

Senior Lecturer, Head of Biomedical Informatics, Signals & Systems Research Laboratory, Department of Electronic, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Director, Centre for Learning, Innovation & Collaboration

University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Pervasive Computing in Education:Pervasive Computing in Education:Realising Our Imagination Realising Our Imagination

"Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so, you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore all around it, and before you know it, you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the result of thought."

Alexander Graham Bell: "electrical speech machine" of 1876

What is Pervasive Computing?

Mainframe: many people share one computer

Personal Computer: one person with one computer

Pervasive & Ubiquitous computing: many

computers serve each person Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing can be thought of as

the idea of invisible computers everywhere. computers are embedded in the environment, each computer performs its tasks without requiring

human awareness or a large amount of human intervention.

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Major Trends in Computing

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Philosophy and Goals of Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing

Computing paradigm in contrast to the desktop model

Integrate computers into our everyday activities

Computer embodiments in infrastructure have varying size and shapes

Early Steps: Construct, deploy, and evaluate tabs, pads, and boards

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

The Early Steps of Pervasive &Ubiquitous

Computing

The initial incarnation of ubiquitous computing was in the form of "tabs", "pads", and "boards" built at Xerox PARC, 1988-1994.

Mobile Computing Research explore the capabilities and impact of mobile

computers in an office setting Palm-sized mobile computers that can communicate

wirelessly through infrared tranceivers to workstation-based applications.

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Types of Ubiquitous Computing Devices

Tabs small, handheld devices, like Post-it notes, or the spine of a

book must carefully balance display size, bandwidth, processing,

memory, power consumption Pads

paper-sized tablets a number are commercially available, but they are not well-

suited for the generalized requirements of a research environment, which includes high customizability

PARC's MPad used FPGAs, so they can even reprogram their hardware!

Boards intelligent whiteboards, allowing for collaborations, storage,

etc.

Wearables

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Applications of Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing

Locating people Collaboration tools Environment control Virtual communities Indirect Management

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Wearable Computing in Science Education:

The Challenge Bridging the gap between pedagogy and front-end technology

Introducing innovation in learning and computational tools The Lab of Tomorrow project is a European project primarily

concerned with capturing sensor data from the local environment, for transmission to some control computer or computers. This is then be used for analysis during science school classes (e.g. high-school physics)

Introducing the concept of wearable computational and on-body sensing devices Combining the use of “toys” for activity-based learning An elaborate system of distributed computation, embedded-

sensing devices, positioning calculation, and data analysis.

www.laboftomorrow.org

IST-2000-25076

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Lab of Tomorrow: The Vision

To contribute towards the connection of science with everyday life activities

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

14 Nov 2004 11

Wearable Computing: Our Perspective

A new form of an embedded-computing: Computing paradigm in contrast

to the desktop model Integrating computers into our

everyday activities Wearable (a definition):

Portable while operational On-body, embedded in clothes,

hands-free Sensing the environment Supporting activity in a

ubiquitous manner Always-on (…depending on

energy capacity)

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Wearable Computing: Distributed Embedded Systems

Baber, et al., IBM Systems Journal, Vol 38, No 4, 1999

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

LoT Wearables

CONNECT

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Technological “Societies”: blessing or burden ?

Computer Systems are getting more complex over time Distributed systems present an inherent

complexity in architectural design and in the way information is structured

Overload of information: vast, dynamic or even unstructured information

“Vagueness” of human knowledge More everyday tasks involve computers More users without the necessary skills

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

“Calm Technology”: Pervasive computing

To cope with the “vagueness of human knowledge”, the complexity of systems and the needs created by the new information “pool” it is required that we leave computers in a proximal periphery and focus on “calm technology”

In other words, build technology that gets our attention when we need to use it, but that relegates itself to the background, and stays aside, actively waiting to assist us.

Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 26-27 January 2007

Mobilearn Architecture

MOBIlearn project presentation – IST-2001-37187

ContextAwarenessSubsystem

ContentServer

Sensors

User inputUser profile

Contentmetadata

Contentrecommendations

XML

XML

XML

XML

XML

Content

Environment

Thank You“The world we have created today has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them”

Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein