SciencePad

 




Recent and anticipated technological advances in wireless computing will permit users to compute ubiquitously, ``anywhere'' and ``any time.''  However, mobile platforms are unlikely to have the computational resources to solve even moderately complex problems that users routinely solve on static workstations today. The  hardware involved in the mobile scenario has inherent restrictions, like limited amounts of communication bandwidth, memory, and power. Another critical issue is the nature of the interfaces, which will need to operate with limited screen space and pen devices. Still other issues arise because of the interaction and collaboration that such a paradigm foresees.  All these factors have contributed to a situation where most truly mobile, hand-held devices do very little by way of actual computation. Unlike their static cousins, they neither have adequate compute power on board, nor do they allow us to access the compute power distributed across the network. This is perhaps a major contributing factor to the relatively slow increase in their use, despite predictions to the contrary.  
In the SciencePad project our aim is to develop ``ubiquitous'' problem solving environments (UPSEs) to support mobile access to applications, especially in the Scientific Computing domain.  There is extensive literature dealing with networking and data management issues in mobile computing. It is evident, though, that merely solving these problems does not, by itself, lead to applications that can run on mobile platforms. For applications to truly thrive in this environment, they must be mobile aware at all levels. The aim of our research is the design and implementation of software environments that would allow users to not just fetch information but do useful computations from mobile platforms. Specifically, we envision a scientist or engineer will ubiquitously access high performance (scientific) computing resources spread across the network via mobile platforms. This will be realized by building ubiquitous problem solving environments (UPSEs), which in turn will build upon our prior work on PSEs for Scientific Computing.


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 Purdue's CS building has been designated for this purpose, and has been used to teach classes such as Mobile Computing and Introduction to Programming. 

Research Areas

Work on SciencePad involves research into various areas of Computer Science. These include
Here is a list of some other sites with information about mobile computing. 
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  • Last modified: Mon Aug 31 98 11:59:57 EDT