Seminar on Accessible Pervasive Computing
CS 671 Spring 2012

Main page

 

Time and Location:

Wednesdays, 1:40PM-4:40PM, Hill Center, Room 254

Announcements and the schedule are posted on the Sakai site.

Introduction

In this seminar, we will explore how to make pervasive computing accessible to a wide range of communities, including users, developers, sensor designers, and administrators. Students should be comfortable programming in Java, C++ or Python before taking the seminar.

Background

Pervasive sensor systems and their applications are potentially disruptive technologies that can improve the way people live by creating new ways to perform environmental monitoring, building automation, power conservation, health care, and work flow optimization. However, Mark Weiser's wider vision of pervasive computing, in which computers become so ubiquitous that we no longer draw a line between interacting with a computer and interacting with the environment, is still unrealized 20 years later.

Researchers have focused on addressing many aspects of pervasive computing, including scalability, energy conservation, fault tolerance, positioning, activity detection, privacy preservation, and context awareness. However, our experiences have shown that the above issues are no longer the main factors limiting widespread adoption of pervasive systems. Instead, it is the development, deployment, and maintenance of pervasive applications that is still prohibitively difficult, especially for those who are not experts in the area.

To make pervasive systems more accessible, pervasive computing must be made no more difficult than traditional computing. Designing, developing, and running a pervasive application should be within the reach of an entry-level programmer with a basic understanding of sensing concepts. People should also be able to maintain the pervasive system with no greater effort than maintaining a personal computer.

The seminar will explore how to break the adoption barriers preventing pervasive computing deployments from becoming commonplace. It will focus on applications: how to make their design, development, deployment, and maintenance easy to average users.  These are key problems but they have received little attention to date. The seminar will investigate using systemic design principles, developed for robust and complex systems, that have been learned from experience in different fields of computer science.

Expected Work

  1. Class participation (5%)
  2. 2 oral paper presentations (10%)
  3. 5 written paper reviews (5%)
  4. Initial position paper (10%)
  5. 2 position paper critiques  (10%)
  6. Revised position paper (20%)
  7. Class project with an artifact and a write-up (30%)
  8. Overall effort (the other 90%)

Reading List

See the list posted on the sakai site.