An Intelligent, Mobile Electronic Notebook
Introduction
The National Information Infrastructure (NII) that will evolve in the 1990's
and beyond will impact many institutions of life. These include the way we
learn and do science, self-caring, access to civil/information infrastructure
systems &services, and management &control of manufacturing
processes. The future scenario for NII assumes wireless networks used by
walkstations realizing the dream of truly ubiquitous access of the national
information superhighway. Some of the current obstacles in building
such a
ubiquitous access system on mobile high-performance platforms include the user
interface for these walkstations, the ability of sniffing information across
heterogeneous geographically distributed information systems, the ability of
processing sensoring data for monitoring and control, and the dynamic
reconfigurability of computations between the mobile unit and the stationary
servers. Our effort in the area of ubiquitous computing, the SciencePad
project, involves the design and implementation of intelligent models and
techniques to address the aforementioned obstacles.
A 90's view of the NII
SciencePad involves the design and development of a software system which will
be characterized by its intelligent user interface for accessing the NII via
mobile platforms. This interface will be multimodal and synergetic, and will
have the ability to access information spread across heterogeneous data and
knowledge bases connected to the NII.
Classroom of the Future
The advent of mobile and ubiquitous computing, in conjunction with multimedia,
high performance computing, and high speed communication backbones, shall bring
about a new paradigm that will strongly influence the way teaching is done. SciencePad is being used in developing the classroom of the future. A room
in the CS building has been designated for this purpose, and is being used this
semester to teach a class in Mobile Computing.
Areas
Work on SciencePad involves research into various areas of Computer Science.
These include
- Intelligent Agents, AI & CI
- Natural Language Processing
- Image Understanding & Vision
- Imagistics
- Neural Networks
- Expert Systems
- Fuzzy Logic
- User Interfaces
- Distributed Problem Solving
- Parallel Computing
- Wireless Networking
Here is a list of some other sites with
information about mobile computing. Our department too has other groups
working in this area.