Research Assistants: T. Drashansky, R. Weerasinghe
Sponsors: AT&T, NSF, Intel, and Purdue University
The National Information Infrastructure (NII) that will emerge in the 1990's will impact many institutions of life; it will change the way we learn and do science, access information, work and collaborate and design physical systems. This future computational power and communication infrastructure will allow computing everywhere. Learning and training simulators will be part of any classroom and laboratory. The concept of classroom, laboratory, and individual workplace will change; they will become virtual places based on an array of multimedia devices. We are developing and implementing the software architecture of such an environment, referred to as SciencePad. It seeks to provide a powerful and ubiquitous tool to aid scientists in their tasks. This project will use existing classrooms and laboratories currently part of the Computational Science and Engineering (CS&E) program. We propose to address related research issues on intelligent computing, intelligent interfaces, intelligent communication, integration of computing systems (i.e., symbolic, numeric, geometric and office) on mobile platforms, and to study the integration of tools to support telematics (e.g., telelearning, teleworking, information/data gathering, teleoperations).
SciencePad can be thought of as a platform that provides generic problem solving capabilities for scientific computing in a ubiquitous environment. Specifically, in this project we integrate access to existing problem solving environments (e.g. PDELab, Mathematica, Matlab), existing information access systems (e.g. WWW, digital libraries), multimedia functionality as well as data acquisition, visualization and analysis tools through SciencePad. The SciencePad PSE is being implemented in a physical classroom/laboratory on a hardware system that contains multimedia devices, wireless networks, notebook computers, high performance computing servers and electronic liveboards. Its efficacy will be evaluated in several courses, including those from the CS Department and the CS&E program.
Information regarding this project is available at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/research/cse/scipad/scipad.html and http://www.cs.purdue.edu/research/cse/softlab/softlab.html.