Jason A. Brotherton

Investigating the capture, integration and access problem of ubiquitous computing in an educational setting

In this paper, we describe efforts to develop and evaluate a large-scale experiment in ubiquitous computing applied to education. Specifically, we are concerned with the general problem of capturing a rich, multimedia experience, and providing useful access into the record of the experience by automatically integrating the various streams of captured information. We describe the Classroom 2000 project and two years of experience developing and using automated tools for the capture, integration and access to support university lecture courses. We will report on observed use of the system by both teachers and learners and how those observations have influenced and will influence the development of a capture, integration and access system for everyday use.

Automated capture, integration, and visualization of multiple media streams

The authors discuss their efforts in building a system for the automatic generation, integration, and visualization of media streams-independent information sources that define rich interactive experiences. This research is done in the context of a project called Classroom 2000, an experiment in ubiquitous computing for education. They view teaching and learning as a form of multimedia authoring and have developed a system that generates much of the educational content that occurs naturally in university lectures. They have developed a taxonomy for characterizing different media streams that can be captured during or after a live session and present solutions to two research issues that affect the access of a rich multimedia record. The first issue deals with the granularity of stream integration. The second issue deals with methods of visualizing a set of integrated media streams that is scalable and that supports a users desire to search by browsing.

Who, What, When, Where, How: Design Issues of Capture & Access Applications

One of the general themes in ubiquitous computing is the construction of devices and applications to support the automated capture of live experiences and the future access of those records. Over the past five years, our research group has developed many different capture and access applications. In this paper, we present an overview of six of these applications. We discuss the different design issues encountered while creating each of these applications and share our approaches to solving these issues (in comparison and in contrast with other work found in the literature). From these issues we define the large design space for automated capture and access. This design space may then serve as a point of reference for designers to extract the requirements for systems to be developed in the future.

Personalizing the capture of public experiences

In this paper, we describe our work on developing a system to support the personalization of a captured public experience. Specifically, we are interested in providing students with the ability to personalize the capture of the lecture experiences as part of the Classroom 2000 project. We discuss the issues and challenges involved in designing a system that performs live integration of personal streams of information with multiple other streams of information made available to it through an environment designed to capture public information.

Context-awareness in wearable and ubiquitous computing

A common focus shared by researchers in mobile, ubiquitous and wearable computing is the attempt to break away from the traditional desktop computing paradigm. Computational services need to become as mobile as their users. Whether that service mobility is achieved by equipping the user with computational power or by instrumenting the environment, all services need to be extended to take advantage of the constantly changing context in which they are accessed. This paper will report on work carried out by the Future Computing Environments Group at Georgia Tech to provide infrastructure for context-aware computing. We will describe some of the fundamental issues involved in contextaware computing, solutions we have generated to provide a flexible infrastructure and several applications that take advantage of context awareness to allow freedom from traditional desktop computing.

Classroom 2000: a system for capturing and accessing multimedia classroom experiences

There is a value to using computational resources to augment the inefficiency of human record-taking, especially when there are multiple streams of related information generated by a group of people. It is virtually impossible for a human to record all aspects of such a rich interactive experience. Computational support can also automate the relationships between various streams of information, so that one stream of information, such as notes taken during a meeting, can be used to index into another stream, such as the audio track from the same meeting. In this way, an integrated, multimedia record of an experience can aid in the recall of the meaning or significance of past events.

A framework for sharing handwritten notes

NotePals is an ink-based, collaborative note taking application that runs on personal digital assistants (PDAs). Meeting participants write notes in their own handwriting on a PDA. These notes are shared with other participants by synchronizing later with a shared note repository that can be viewed using a desktop-based web browser. NotePals is distinguished by its lightweight process, interface, and hardware. This demonstration illustrates the design of two different NotePals clients and our web-based note browser.

Building a digital library of captured educational experiences

Since 1995, we have been researching the application of ubiquitous computing technology to support the automated capture of live university lectures so that students and teachers may later access them. With virtually no additional effort beyond that which lecturers already expend on preparing and delivering a lecture, we are able to create a repository, or digital library, of rich educational experiences that is constantly growing. The resulting archive includes a heterogeneous mix of materials presented in lectures. We discuss access issues for this digital library that cover short-term and long-term use of the repository. While our efforts have focused quite a bit on short-term access that occurs over the duration of a course, it is clear that significant value is added to the archive as it is tuned for long-term use. These long-term access issues for an experiential digital library have not yet been addressed, and we highlight some of those challenges in this paper.