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 January 2007 Pervasive Computing in Education: 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 January 2007

Major Trends in Computing Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 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 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,  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 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 January 2007

Applications of Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing  Locating people  Collaboration tools  Environment control  Virtual communities  Indirect Management Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 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.  IST Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens January 2007

Lab of Tomorrow: The Vision To contribute towards the connection of science with everyday life activities Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens January 2007

14 Nov 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 January 2007

Wearable Computing: Distributed Embedded Systems Baber, et al., IBM Systems Journal, Vol 38, No 4, 1999 Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens January 2007

LoT Wearables

CONNECT Advanced Technologies in Education, Athens 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 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 January 2007

Mobilearn Architecture MOBIlearn project presentation – IST Context Awareness Subsystem Content Server Sensors User input User profile Content metadata Content recommendations 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 Einstein