Overview            Background            Description of the new course

Overview

We propose to develop and deploy prototype mobile, e-services printing solutions on the Purdue University campus. Among the three campus populations: faculty, staff, and students, students are by far the most mobile. Their daily routines keep them constantly on the move, from classroom to classroom, to laboratories, libraries, the gym, the cafeteria, their room in the residence hall, and their favorite hangouts. By comparison, faculty and staff tend to spend much more of their time in their offices. (Most students have no offices.) As laptops and PDAs become cheaper and more capable, we can expect that most students will have one; and that they will carry it with them all the time, using it everywhere to read e-mail, work on assignments, and use web-based resources to do research and a myriad of other things. Wireless access such as through 802.11B, which is already available on some parts of the Purdue campus, and will certainly be expanded to include the entire campus in the not-too-distant future, will enable this mode of operation. Students will spend a decreasing fraction of their time using computers in laboratories, choosing instead to work anywhere, anytime with their mobile tools.

     While the computational resources (PDAs, notebooks, and laptops) and to a large extent the capture devices (digital cameras and handheld scanners) are well-suited to moving with the student, devices for hardcopy output are not. Printing is certainly an essential need for every student; and is something that most students will do several times a day. However, it is difficult to envision a time when every student will carry a printer in his/her backpack. This is because printing is a more intermittent task than working with a PDA, notebook, or laptop; and printers must handle media which will not shrink in size, Thus printers will never be as small as a digital camera, which is also used only intermittently, but which can be tossed into a backpack with little net increase in load. So providing students, who with their computers and capture devices are a self-contained and mobile unit, with convenient, effective access to printing resources, that are inherently immobile, must be viewed as one of the more challenging aspects of developing a truly mobile campus. .

     We envision a campus in which printers that students may use are no longer confined to laboratories, but rather can be found everywhere, and can be accessed wirelessly from anywhere. As they walk to class, students will access notes for the class from the web on their PDA in a PDA-viewable form, and then print those notes in a different format on a printer near the classroom. After class, they will print the homework assignment that was just announced, on their way to the student lounge, again from the web, using their PDA. They may snap a photo outdoors for a class project, and then print it at photo-quality in a nearby building. Simple location information from the PDA will identify the nearest printer with the desired resources; and the printer will notify the student via their PDA, when their print-out is ready. In order to make this vision a reality, a number of significant problems in wireless communication and networking, security, e-services and printer management, and multimedia document repurposing and printing must be resolved. These issues will be tackled by teams of highly motivated students eager to explore this new wireless world. A new design course will provide the framework for this effort, which will be supervised by the Purdue faculty listed in this proposal. The equipment to be purchased under this proposal will be used to deploy the prototype mobile, e-services printing solutions, and to enable the students teams to carry out their work in a highly mobile fashion.

Background

HP and Purdue have enjoyed a strong relationship for many years. HP has regularly supported the educational mission of Purdue with grants of instructional equipment. Recent programs that have been supported in this manner include the ECE undergraduate digital systems design curriculum (1999), the Institute for Woman and Technology (1999), and the Video and Image Systems Engineering (VISE) program (2000). HP has also hired many graduates from Purdue. Currently, over 300 Purdue alumni are employed by HP. A similar number of Purdue graduates are employed by Agilent.

     The VISE program (www.purdue.edu/VISE) was initiated in 1995 in response to a challenge by HP to a select group of universities worldwide to develop imaging-centric curricula. Since its start, funded by an initial grant from HP, over 1200 Purdue students have learned about imaging through this program. This year, we moved into a new state-of-the-art 1312 square foot, 36-seat lecture/laboratory facility, fully equipped with HP computers. The curriculum using this facility presently consists of 16 courses. During the spring semester, two of these courses were videotaped, and one of them was made available over the web as streaming video. We are now making plans for all VISE courses to be made available in this form.

     In the area of printing, HP and Purdue have an especially strong partnership. Since 1993, Purdue researchers have worked with several divisions within the Image and Printing Systems unit to provide solutions for problems in the imaging pipeline for printers. These activities have evolved into the Digital Print Systems program that today involves 6 Purdue faculty in 4 different departments, as well as 13 graduate students. Five patents have been issued or applied for, as a result of this work. At the present time, virtually all inkjet printers manufactured by HP incorporate Purdue technology developed in this program. Future LaserJet products will also contain Purdue technology. A total of 6 graduate alumni of this research program and its precursor activities are employed at HP. More recently, HP funded an effort within Computer Sciences at Purdue to further the understanding of how to efficiently and effectively share and create web-accessible e-services, using HP's e-speak open systems. Both these printing and e-services efforts will provide essential background for the proposed work in mobile printing at Purdue.

     The nine faculty who will participate in this program are from three different departments at Purdue. They are listed in Table 1 along with their respective areas of responsibility. In addition to the track record in printing and e-services mentioned earlier, they collectively bring together internationally recognized expertise in communications and networks, security, and multimedia signal processing.

     Purdue's IT infrastructure is highly decentralized, although a position of Vice-President for Information Technology reporting directly to the Vice-President for Academic Affairs (Provost) and the Vice-President for Finance (Treasurer) has recently been created, and will be filled soon. A campus-wide network is operated by the Purdue University Computing Center (PUCC), headed by John Steele. PUCC also manages computer resources for a large portion of the Purdue student population, including over 80 HP LaserJet printers, most of which are either 8100 or 8500 class. John Steele has promised full support, as needed, for the program described in this proposal.

     Two other large campus operations that are relevant to this proposal are the Engineering Computer Network (ECN) headed by Bill Simmons and the Department of Computer Sciences system managed by Tim Korb. At the present time, wireless 802.11B service is available throughout the buildings housing both Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Sciences. Plans are underway to expand this access to the entire main engineering campus, including the space outdoors between the buildings. In addition, ECE recently assembled the Mobile Wireless Computing Lab (MWCL) to enable the use of simulation, analysis, and computing experiments in classes that would not normally be scheduled in a computing lab. The mobile lab consists of 14 (to be expanded to 24) very small but well equipped laptops with wireless cards, one portable access point, a variety of removable storage media devices, and a mobile storage cabinet with built-in power distribution. Also, ECE purchased 200 wireless cards for student and faculty use, of which 100 are available for semester-long checkout by students. This enables students owning laptops to easily take advantage of the new wireless infrastructure in ECE.

Description of the new design course

The new junior/senior level design course CS/ECE/ME 49x Design for Mobile and E-Services Printing will comprise the core of the proposed program. It will be jointly listed in the departments of the participating faculty to allow students in each department to earn credit toward their respective majors when they enroll in the course. The course will be modeled after the highly successful Engineering Projects in Community Services (EPICS) program (http://epics.ecn.purdue.edu/) at Purdue. This award-winning program engages students in multiyear service projects that benefit a variety of underserved populations in our local community. Ed Coyle, one of the EPICS co-founders, will serve as a consultant to our program to help us achieve successful project outcomes. Enrollment in CS/ECE/ME 49x will be limited to 36 students who will be selected through a competitive application process. The students will work in 12 teams of 3 each on specific projects that will be distributed among the four areas described in the following section. At the end of each semester, the students will prepare a final project report and give formal presentations and demonstrations. The reports and all presentation materials, including streaming video will be posted on the web. Based on the reports and presentations, the projects will be competitively evaluated. The best 3 projects will be chosen for presentation at a national conference. Two experienced graduate students will be employed as teaching assistants for the course. They will serve as a technical resource, and will coordinate the course activities.

     The mode of course and project operation will serve as an exemplar of collaboration between students and faculty in the new always-on, wireless world. Each student and faculty member will be issued an HP Jornada 720 (to be returned at the end of the semester), each equipped with a card for wireless 802.11B access. The Jornada's will be used to wirelessly exchange e-mails, schedule meetings, keep track of project tasks, and share project data. They will also be used to investigate mobile printing issues, as discussed below.

Year 1 activities

Wireless communications and networking. The availability of low cost, low power, wireless local area and ad-hoc networking is a critical component of our plans for mobile e-services printing on the Purdue University campus. Most prominent system examples (IEEE 802.11B and Bluetooth) utilize unlicensed spectrum in the 2.4 GHz band where interference stands to be a significant problem. In fact, the interoperability of Bluetooth and 802.11B devices is a potential problem as 802.11B follows a carrier sense protocol (i.e., it waits for pauses in traffic before transmitting) while Bluetooth does not. We will investigate these and more general interference issues. We will also prototype an 802.11B/Bluetooth interoperable HP printer.
     Security. Low cost encryption schemes, suitable for use by mobile devices are generally not robust. However, we believe that it will be possible to exploit the special nature of printer-bound data to achieve robust compression even with such schemes. An example would be encryption of the data after compression, rather than as plain text, which is known to greatly increase robustness of even simple encryption methods. We will also examine watermarking schemes to control the right to print on a given printer, the right to copy printer output, and to authenticate who did the printing, and on which printer. These are all especially important issues in an environment where printers are widely dispersed in very public areas, and where the user will generally not be present when the print job is completed.
      E-services and printer management. Using the HP Mobility software tools, including E-speak as a foundation and the Chai EVM, we will develop a framework for mobile users to effectively discover printing resources, and monitor the status of submitted jobs. We will also develop a convenient graphical display for PDAs that shows a map of available resources as small icons. Clicking on an icon will provide access to the resource that it represents. This will bring up information regarding its capabilities and availability for use. A special application of these technologies will be directed toward providing disabled students with aids to navigate the campus. A current EPICS project is developing navigational aids that can be accessed from a kiosk. With this program, we will add the capability for the disabled student to use his/her PDA to wirelessly print a locally oriented map and directions on a nearby printer.
      Multimedia document repurposing and printing. Printing documents from a PDA requires that the user be able to effectively locate and examine the document using the very limited display capabilities of that device. This is particularly challenging if the document contains images or even audio and video clips. If the documents are resident on a server, we want the PDA to access the document in one form and the printer to receive it in a different form. All this should be transparent and seamless to the user. The whole issue of how, if at all, multimedia components should even be interpreted by the printer is also very important. We will examine these issues, and develop prototype solutions.
     The requested equipment will be used to outfit the student teams to conduct their research and development, and also to deploy prototype mobile, e-services printing solutions on the Purdue campus. We are requesting a sufficient number of Jornada 720s and wireless 802.11B LAN cards to outfit each student, faculty member, and TA, plus a few spares. The Jornada 548 Pocket PCs and accessories, plus spares will be issued to each of the 12 teams for research and development. The Omnibook 6000s will be shared among the teams for the same purposes, as well as for doing presentations. A few of each of the two types of printers will be shared among the teams for research and development. The remaining units will be placed around campus to support live usage experiments with the student population. The Netservers will support the research and development effort, as well as actually serving the prototype mobile, printing e-services to the campus.

Year 2 activities

The development of prototype mobile, e-services printing solutions for the Purdue campus will be a 2 year activity; so the Year 1 activities will continue into the second year with a concomitant request for additional equipment and cash from HP. However, we also expect our work to be mature enough at the end of Year 1 to allow us to export it to the EPICS program. Thus, we will come full circle, having borrowed the EPICS model for our own design course, and then paying back with a suite of mobile, e-services technology capabilities that will find a new and broader expression in the rich set of EPICS applications, and the EPICS teamwork infrastructure. For the second year, we will also request equipment and cash to support this activity.

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