Second CoolCampus Workshop

The second CoolCampus Workshop entitled "Mobile and Pervasive Computing in the University of the Future" held on 23 April 2004.

Location: The Council Chamber, Building 3A, Clayton Campus, Monash University.

Keynote Speakers will include Prof Dr Gerhard Schwabe, Uni of Zurich, Dr Elaine Lawrence, UTS, Dr Chris Johnson, University of Sydney and Assoc.Prof Bruce Thomas, University of SA.

[Workshop Program] (pdf, 28KB) Registration and inquiries can be made to Rob Gray, CoolCampus Executive Officer, rob.gray@infotech.monash.edu.au or Tel. no: 03 9903 1249. Registration closing date is on Wednesday, 21st April 2004.

Workshop on Mobile and Pervasive Technology in the University of the Future

(Workshop to be held at Monash University Clayton, Melbourne, Friday 23^rd April 2004)

Background to CoolCampus Initiative at Monash

The last decade has seen the power and capability of computing devices and communications networks increase dramatically. Many researchers believe that this is making possible a new computing paradigm - pervasive or invisible computing - where computing technologies will recede into the background.

In fact, increasingly, the problem in computer systems is not the capacity of the computers and communications links, but rather the limited and precious resource of human attention. The growing field of pervasive computing research is investigating the technical and social challenges of creating new computerised environments. These will recede into the background of our everyday lives and empower us to be more effective in the activities that we undertake.

The Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University has established the CoolCampus Initiative in an effort to connect its existing pervasive computing research activities and to generate more opportunities for its pervasive computing researchers to collaborate with and engage university and industry partners. Full details of the Initiative are at: http://infotech.monash.edu/coolcampus/index.html .

In order to publicise this vision of pervasive computing and help other Monash researchers to start to think how they might get involved, the CoolCampus initiative is holding a Workshop at the Clayton Campus on Friday 23^rd of April. Key aspects of the Initiative to be addressed at this Workshop are:

• To provide opportunities for Monash students and staff to see and experience a technology-based future where information will be made available wherever and whenever it is needed through the provision of many usable research prototypes and demonstration applications;
• To create synergy from collaboration between academic researchers and groups within Monash University responsible for providing administrative and academic services to students and staff such as the Library, Student and Staff Services, Information Technology Services, the Centre for Learning and Teaching Support, etc.

External speakers will inject their own view of the future for pervasive technology on campus.

Themes

• Pervasive Computing in an Educational (University) Environment is the general thrust with the aim to show strong correlation between the virtual and physical worlds in the future
• In particular this workshop seeks engagement from Monash faculties other than IT and to collectively develop a vision of future pervasive applications on campus that could lead to new research and demonstrators which deal with real or perceived needs
• How processes might change over 5-10 years due to Pervasive Technology striving to meet the identified Campus needs
• E-admin and e-services as well as e-learning are an integral part of CoolCampus
• Discussion of related application areas such as use of PDA's by nurses in ambulances, real-time dynamic information services for students, eg change of class times via PDA's, dynamic notice boards - may also encompass "online" in a fuller sense, with a single port of call for student services; learning by using PDA's and Tablet computers, and use of smart phones for admin support.

External Speakers

• Assoc. Prof. Bruce H. Thomas, Director Wearable Computer Lab, School of Computer and Information Science, The University of South Australia
  • Social Weight and Pervasive Computing [pdf, 6.72MB]

This talk will explore how technology impacts social interaction by placing barriers between people's normal social intercourse in the context of modern pervasive computing enhanced environments. We define a concept of "social weight" to quantify this interruption. The social weight of an item of technology is defined to be the measure of the degradation of social interaction that occurs between the user and other people caused by the use of that item of technology.  These barriers will become more noticeable as the use of technology increases through the use of pervasive computing. We view pervasive computing as the overlapping of ubiquitous computing and mobile/wearable computing. A partial list of attributes of ubiquitous computing is computers are embedded in the environment, having continuous access to networked resources, and public active surfaces. In other words, the computers are all around the user. Where as for mobile/wearable computing, the user carries all their computing needs and examples of mobile/wearable computing are handheld computers and body worn computers.

• Dr Elaine Lawrence, Program Leader, Internetworking, Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney
  • E-Technology v E-Law: Legal Challenges to the Information Society [pdf, 169KB]

E-Business and Mobile Enterprises face unique legal risks as well as concerns that apply to traditional businesses. Governance and accountability issues associated with disruptive technologies, such as peer-to-peer technologies, spamming and wireless technologies, are particularly challenging.  Mobile Enterprises must be alert to the potential threats posed by hackers, virus and worm writers as well as warchalkers and wardrivers and take steps to secure itself. Various laws have been successfully applied to electronic transactions and new laws (cyberlaws) have been devised to deal with the latest technologies. This talk covers the legal issues of privacy, online transactions, online content, encryption and jurisdiction, and examines the role of technology and the law in both addressing and/or hindering the solving of these issues. The digital economy develops at e-speed but the law does not. The author outlines the enormous technological advances that impact on electronic and mobile enterprises and illustrates, with examples, the reactions from international and national legal communities.

• Prof Dr Gerhard Schwabe is (full) Professor in Information Systems at the University of Zurich,Switzerland,(ranked among the top 50 universities worldwide  and among the top ten European universities according to a recent worldwide study of Shanghaii University). His research interests include collaborative technologies, Bank IT, E-Government and Mobile Learning. Gerhard received his academic education at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, both in Germany. He was  Professor at the University of Koblenz-Landau for four years before  moving to Zurich in 2002. He heads a research group of seven fulltime research assistants. Gerhard spends seven weeks of his sabbatical leave in Australia and - besides giving research talks - is looking forward to interesting discussions that may lead to joint research ventures.

  • Mobile Learning [pdf, 2.27MB]

  While a first wave of E-Learning projects focussed on providing content over distance and administrating large amounts of students, newer projects focus on interactive features. One approach uses collaborative technologies to support the learning process, another modern  approach uses simulations (e.g. business simulation games) to enrich learning situations. Mobile learning takes both approaches one step further. The learner is provided with context dependent information for his immediate learning needs at any time and any place.   Both informal and formal learning benefit from this approach: Informal learning,  for example, can take place when a museum visitor is interested in an artifact and can access stored information or knowledgeable persons on the fly. This approach becomes interesting when this information is not only created by the exhibitor but also by a community of museum visitors. For formal learning we study the use of mobile technology for situated case study research.
  
  The talk will present  results of EU-Project Mobilearn and of research done by  the Zurich Information Management Group. Mobile learning scenarios include museum, health, executive training, orientation games, and tourism.

• Dr Chris Johnson (C.W.Johnson), Smart Internet Technology CRC, visiting the School of Information Technology, University of Sydney
  from Department of Computer Science, Australian National University
• Location, location, location: a lot of technology, a little bit of privacy [pdf, 576KB]

Making computers behave in ways that are appropriate to the user's actual location (location-appropriate computing, otherwise known as location awareness) is a central concern in pervasive computing. To provide location-appropriate computing requires not only the ability to sense the location of the user, but also to distribute and manage the resulting location information, and to help application programs to apply the information. A significant issue in its management is that we are dealing with the location of people in the real world: to maintain the users' trust we must manage the information about their own locations with appropriate levels of privacy and security.

I will briefly review technologies for sensing location, and location information management from the point of view of the information model and the need for privacy, and describe some experiments in piggybacking location sensing on the communications and computing devices that people are willing to carry for other purposes that are more important to them.

Demonstrations

An opportunity will exist over the lunch break to review work on demonstrators which make use of technologies such as wireless LANS, PDAs, tablet computers, IP phones, location sensing infrastructure, etc. to demonstrate useful context aware information services.

Current list of demonstrations include:

• Mobile VNC application by Evi Syukur. Context sensitivity is particularly useful if we want to give mobile users an experience of responsive and attentive services depending on their current contexts. However, to support proactive context awareness in mobile environment requires the sufficient accuracy of location positioning system and spontaneous way of downloading and executing the context application on the mobile device. This demonstration shows the ability of adding context awareness to a traditional VNC application (Supervisors Dr. Seng Wai Loke and Dr. Peter Stanski).
• Walkabout Learning by Dr. Des Casey.
• Research in Severless Network Storage resulted in a prototype application implemented for IPAQs by Wei Ye (Supervisor Dr. Asad Khan).
• Pervasive computing encourages the interaction between humans and robots. This demonstration by Paul Hii will showcase the capabilities of a simple robot today and foretell what the University of the Future will incorporate (Supervisor A/Prof. Arkady Zaslavsky).

Registrations

Register by email to rob.gray@infotech.monash.edu.au . Queries to Rob Gray at 03 9903 1249. Registration closing date is on Wednesday, 21st April 2004.

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