Investigating Research Issues in Ubiquitous Computing: The Capture, Integration, and Access Problem

College of Computing & GVU Center
Georgia Institute of Technology

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PROGRAM AREA

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PROJECT SUMMARY

In this project, we focus on automating the capture of individual and group experiences in order to facilitate access to a richly integrated record of events. We refer to this as the automated capture, integration and access problem for ubiquitous computing. We take an applications focus in approaching this problem. Natural candidates for the capture, integration and access tools are collaborative activities ---meetings, education, design. Whereas previous research in ubiquitous computing has focused on support for a single individual in the midst of a collaborative exchange, we will apply capture, integration and access tools to support many simultaneous collaborators.

We have initiated a large-scale ubiquitous computing effort at Georgia Tech ---entitled Classroom 2000--- to provide automated environments and tools to capture, integrate and access the rich interaction of the classroom experience. This effort will grow to support a wide variety of classes and assist students throughout their educational career and beyond. We are investigating open issues, such as the effect of granularity of capture, support for revision during access, and how interaction between collaborators affects capture and integration. We will plan and carry out an evaluation plan to determine the impact of capture, access, and integration on educational goals. We are specifically interested in determining if this technology supports note-taking practices that contribute to near- and long-term retention of knowledge. We hope that our work will provide a standard of evaluation for the experimental ubiquitous computing community as well as provide insight into more effective and modern teaching and learning methods. Finally, we will further demonstrate the generality of the capture, access, and integration problem through its application to other domains beyond education.

Much of the research focus in this proposal has an immediate relevance toward education. We expect to make a significant impact on educational practices by evaluating the effectiveness of ubiquitous computing technology ---handheld devices, pen-based interfaces and cross-platform software delivery. As students and teachers experiment with the tools and new modes of interaction that are enabled by our technology, we expect new forms of education to emerge if we can show that they provide ways to motivate and energize both teacher and student.

PROJECT REFERENCES

Gregory D. Abowd, Chris Atkeson, Ami Feinstein, Yusuf Goolamabbas, Cindy Hmelo, Scott Register, Nitin "Nick" Sawhney and Mikiya Tani. Classroom 2000: Enhancing classroom interaction and review. GVU Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, Technical Report GIT-GVU-96-21. September 1996. Postscript version

Gregory D. Abowd, Anind K. Dey, Rob Orr, and Jason Brotherton. Context-awareness in Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing. GVU Technical Report GIT-GVU-97-11. May 1997. HTML version

Gregory D. Abowd. Ubiquitous Computing: Research Themes and Open Issues from an Applications Perspective GVU Technical Report GIT-GVU-96-24. December 1996. Postscript version

Future Computing Environments Group. Classroom 2000 WWW Home page, http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/c2000.

Nitin "Nick" Sawhney, Gregory D. Abowd and Chris Atkeson. Can Electronic Notebooks Enhance the Classroom? GVU Technical Report GVU-96-06, February 1996. HTML version

AREA BACKGROUND

What is ubiquitous computing technology? Our general working definition is any computing technology that permits human interaction away from a single workstation. This includes pen-based technology, hand-held or portable devices, large-scale interactive screens, wireless networking infrastructure, and voice or vision technology.

As Weiser points out, ``Applications are of course the whole point of ubiquitous computing.'' [Weiser 93] There are three major research themes that generalize some of this applications focus:

• automating the capture of individual and group experiences in order to facilitate access to a richly integrated record of events;
• customizing computational services based on knowledge of the user's physical context; and
• providing ubiquitous software services that are available on many different physical devices and integrated with a changing set of other services.

The Marquee note-taking prototype developed at PARC [Weber and Poon 94], the Filochat prototype developed at Hewlett-Packard Labs [Whittaker et al. 94], and the Dynomite personal note-taking environment from FX-PAL [Wilcox et al. 97], provide a personal electronic, pen-based note-taking device . Augmented Paper-based solutions to note-taking have also been researched by Stifelman [Hindus and Schmandt 92] and at Apple [Degen et al. 92].

AREA REFERENCES

A. Dix, J. Finlay, G. Abowd and R. Beale. Human-Computer Interaction, Prentice-Hall International, 1993.

D. Hindus and C. Schmandt. Ubiquitous audio: Capturing spontaneous collaboration. In Proceedings of ACM CSCW'92 Conference, pages 210-217, 1992.