Anna Marina Scapolla

A new and open model to share laboratories on the Internet

A new model for sharing real laboratories on the Internet and creating a virtual on-line laboratory has been developed and validated in the field of electronic measurements. Testing theories through practice is an important approach to scientific teaching, and appropriate solutions have not yet been found to support this activity in Web-based education. The on-line laboratory addresses this issue. It allows the execution via Web of real experiments and manages concurrency among users who remotely drive instruments and carry out experiments. The experimental setup can be distributed in different real laboratories, spread on a wide-area network, and controlled by local computers. Users can practice through the network and transparently to the actual locations of the devices under test in a multiuser concurrent way. The proposed paradigm increases the possibility of practice in both academic and industrial education and enriches the current experience in e-learning.

XML technologies to design didactical distributed measurement laboratories

Laboratory activity is an open challenge for on-line teaching applied to scientific domains. The remote control of instrumentation and the execution of real experiments via Internet are topics of interest for many researchers. This paper introduces the model of a virtual laboratory that allows practicing via Internet in real laboratories spread on a wide area network. It is based on a main virtual laboratory server (VLS), one or more real laboratory servers (RLS) and client stations. Real laboratory servers control instrumentation and drive experiments. The network links all the distributed software components of the environment. The paper focuses on the use of XML (Extensible Markup Language) and its related technologies to support the development of such environment. XML plays a central role in the definition of the environment (instruments, experiments and users activities) and in the maintenance process. These technologies are very promising to address scalability and interoperability among distributed software applications and to facilitate information reuse ensuring data coherency, completeness and reliability. The proposed data organization results effective to develop, maintain and scale up the environment and facilitates the cooperation and the contribution of many partners to the virtual laboratory project.

A Service-Oriented Educational Laboratory for Electronics

This paper proposes a service-oriented middleware to access heterogeneous remote laboratory equipment and experimental settings through the network. The Web service paradigm is used to expose the functionality of the instruments and to compose measurement workflows in a multilevel architecture that enables high flexibility, scalability, and interoperability. The proposed architecture has been applied to the development of a remote laboratory for education on electronics, but the middleware can address a broad range of instrumentation and experimental activities in different fields via the same architectural design.

Design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a wireless fall detector

Due to demographic reasons the percentage of elderly citizens in developed countries is rapidly increasing and as a consequence prevention of age-related problems is getting more important. Falls are amongst the most frequent causes for injuries to the aging population and many efforts have been concentrated in fall detection and prevention. This paper presents the design, implementation and experimental analysis of a portable wireless fall detector.

A Web-Based Laboratory for Digital Signal Processing

This paper presents a web-based laboratory to practice with embedded systems and in particular with Digital Signal Processing. The laboratory has been developed using a service oriented architecture to guarantee flexibility and interoperability with different electronic devices. Moreover it provides end users with a web based interface directly accessible through Internet and employees a wide range of modern Web 2.0 technologies. This approach allows creating complex web applications avoiding to install any plug-in on usersâ?? browsers. The paper presents how the remote laboratory can be used in an e-learning scenario and details how it can be integrated in feasible educational path based on common learning platforms such as Moodle.

A Grid-Based Architecture for the Composition and the Execution of Remote Interactive Measurements

This paper investigates the application of Grid technologies to the execution of remote interactive laboratory measurements. The authors introduce the state-of-art in the field of Grid technologies application to instrument control, and propose an operative model to set up remote interactive measurements. The model implies the abstraction of actual instruments as Grid resources, and the publishing of their main features and functionalities by means of Grid Services. The issues of the interaction with and the integration among the instruments are investigated. The goal is to support composition and execution of remote interactive measurements by instruments connected to different Grid nodes.

Cooperative and Distance Learning in Electronics Using Internet

This paper describes a project for the creation of a distributed system integrating computerbased learning material, network services and communication facilities within an environment provided by W3 technology. We present a detailed outline of the system architecture from a technical point of view and describe how the different classes of users interact with the system. The project aims to promote cooperative and distance learning in electronics for the students of two curricula in Electronic Engineering, using Internet to exchange information between tutors and learners.

Survey of Remote Laboratories Using Service Oriented Architectures

Remote access to real laboratories can enhance traditional educational paths with practical experiences. However, most of the existing remote laboratories cannot communicate with each other and they are not yet completely integrated with common educational platforms such as Learning Management Systems. These problems could be tackled by offering to end users remote experiments as distributed services using web service technology. The paper examines the architectures of remote laboratories developed by three institutions: DIBE ISILab (Internet Shared Instrumentation Laboratory), HPI DCL (Distributed Control Laboratory) and MIT iLab. Their front-end services are compared and discussed. The paper details how end-user applications interact with these remote labs and reports on the results of a preliminary test of interoperability between remote labs, providing a hint on how different remote experiments can be shared between different institutions.

Exposing Measurement Instruments As Grid Services

This paper presents the rationale and the experience in exposing measurement instruments on the Grid. After explaining the design goals, we propose two implementation strategies targeted to access the instruments at different levels of abstraction. A performance evaluation of the realized services concludes the paper.

XML data representation for testing automation

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) technologies seem to offer solutions for a wide range of automated testing issues. In fact, these technologies are very promising to address scalability and interoperability among distributed software applications and to facilitate reuse ensuring data coherency, completeness and reliability. In this paper we discuss the use of XML for representing the whole set of information regarding configuration and classification data involved with a software environment for test automation. Thus we introduce a case study where the effectiveness of this approach was used to face the automated testing of telecommunication device.