21 st Century Learning P. Anandan Managing Director Microsoft Research India

Challenges in Teaching and Collaboration  Amplify the voice of the teacher  Extend and expand the reach of the teacher and the classroom  Enhance the learning experience  Seamless interaction between teacher, students, and learning materials  Strengthen teamwork  Bring the meeting home

Technology: Good or Bad?

…A little better?

How about this? Classroom on your lap

Technologies  Conference XP  Tablet PC as a medium for teaching and learning  Real-time collaboration and whiteboard capture

Conference XP Courtesy: Chris Moffat, MSR

Conference XP  A high-end conferencing system for:  Collaboration  Distance Learning  Inexpensive and easy to deploy  Done in partnership with several US universities  Supports advanced interactive learning (using TabletPC)

ConferenceXP Research Platform  High-quality, multi-point conferencing  A framework for the development of real-time collaborative applications for teaching and learning

ConferenceXP Scenarios  High end real-time collaboration  Transform distributed learning  Energize wireless-enabled classrooms

Research Collaboration Research Collaboration  High-quality, multipoint conferencing  Full-screen real-time video at 30 fps  Up to 10-way conferencing on dual processor, 3.0 GHz workstation

Real-time Collaboration Real-time Collaboration  Built-in presentation capability  Peer-to-peer multicast architecture  Simple approach to adding 3 rd party applications

Real-time Collaboration Some ConferenceXP Deployments Connected to Internet2 Evaluation and/or Development  Argonne National Lab  Brown University  Carnegie Mellon  Cornell Theory Center  Galway College – Ireland  Internet2  NCSA  University of Texas at Austin  UC Berkeley  UC Davis  UC San Diego  UC Santa Cruz  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  University of Massachusetts  University of Washington  East Carolina University  Indiana University  Indian Institute of Technology - India  Iowa State University  MIT  National Technological University – Argentina  NorthWestern University  Penn State University  Singapore Management University  University of Milano – Italy  University of Pisa – Italy  University of Salerno – Italy  University of Zurich – Switzerland  Virginia Tech

Distributed Learning

University of Washington Professional Masters Program (Computer Sciences)

Distributed Learning Case Study

Wireless Classrooms ConferenceXP Capabilities  Efficient peer-peer, multicast network support enables scalability of many wireless devices in the classroom Wireless Network Wireless Network

Wireless Classrooms ConferenceXP Capabilities  Efficient peer-to-peer multicast network support enables scalability of many wireless devices in the classroom Wireless Network Wireless Network

Wireless Classrooms Classroom Presenter (University of Washington)  Tablet PC–based classroom presentation system  Deployed widely at University of Washington and other schools  Integration with student devices:  Note taking (OneNote, ReMarkableTexts)  Classroom feedback  Student submissions

Wireless Classrooms OneNote Integration

Wireless Classrooms Engaging Learning Environments Collaborative Labs — Amherst Math Visualization — Brown Design Sketching — MIT Physics Illustrator — MIT, MS

Enhanced Meeting Experience

We all attend meetings/classes …  Complaints  A class may be distributed (location-shifted)  Cannot hear other people clearly from a remote site  Cannot see who is in a remote site  Cannot see what is written on the whiteboard  Feel partially disconnected when I am remote  When watch a recorded class (time-shifted)  Can only view the meeting in a linear way  No clue about the meeting dynamics  Develop MM technologies and systems to alleviate the pains  Allow time-shifted participation  Off-line viewing  Allow location-shifted participation

Real-Time Room Conferencing (Eric Rudolph, Yong Rui, Liwei He, Rico Malvar, Michael Cohen, Ivan Tashev)  Key features  High fidelity audio (via microphone array)  High quality video (via wide-angle cam, dewarping)  Live physical whiteboard capture  Physical document capture and sharing

Real-time Whiteboard Capture (Liwei He, Zhengyou Zhang) Goal: turn a video stream of whiteboard into a low bit rate data stream that contains only the changes on the whiteboard. Solution: use computer vision techniques to analyze the video sequence to determine which changes represent inks on the whiteboard. Cell based motion detection Lighting change Color enhancementEncode Background color model No YesReset Update New strokes Strokes & background Cell classification Incoming frame

Conclusion  Technology can go beyond being a tool  It can change the experience  Enable new scenarios  Enhance the quality of the experience  Extend the reach of the teacher  It can revolutionize the way learning is done

A Vision For the Future