Course Title: Pervasive Computing (H)

Spring 2003

Instructors: Prof. Anant Agarwal (agarwal@mit.edu) and Dr. Umar Saif (umar@mit.edu)

Staff: Cornelia Colyer (colyer@cag.lcs.mit.edu)

Time: TTh 2:30-4:00PM

Place: 36-153

Prerequisites: 6.004, 6.033

3-0-9

Course Description

This course will study the mechanisms and environments of pervasive computing. Topics include computer and network architectures for pervasive computing, mobile computing mechanisms, human-computer interaction using speech and vision, pervasive software systems, location mechanisms, practical techniques for security and user-authentication, and experimental pervasive computing systems.

We will meet twice a week for a mixture of lectures and class discussions of assigned readings. Grades will be based on class participation and a course project. Each student will present one or more assigned papers and lead a class discussion. Projects can be performed individually or in groups.

Paper Reading Sessions

The following is a schedule of papers to be discussed in each class. During each ninety-minute class, three papers will be presented. In conference program-committee style, each paper will be discussed for about thirty minutes by three students: a presenter, an advocate, and a devil’s advocate. The rest of the class acts as the program committee for an imaginary conference on pervasive computing.

The presenter gives a fifteen-minute presentation describing the basic ideas in the paper and the main contributions. The advocate then has five minutes to convince the class that the paper should be accepted for our imaginary conference. The devil’s advocate, playing the role of a reviewer who has decided the paper should be rejected, is given five minutes to highlight the shortcomings of the technical arguments and the presentation of the paper.

A five-minute question-and-answer period follows these presentations, after which the class votes to accept or reject the paper for our conference.