Progress Report for 2001 Grant
  A Proposal to Establish a Curriculum in Mobile Communications Projects at Purdue University

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What the project set out to accomplish

     The goal of our project was to investigate issues related to mobile printing in a campus environment, and to develop new solutions and new capabilities to transform campus printing. Specific focus areas were wireless communications and networking, security, e-services and printer management, and multimedia document repurposing and printing. The proposed mechanism for accomplishing this was to organize students in small teams, each working under the supervision of one or two Purdue faculty members. A new junior/senior design course was to provide the framework for this effort. Coordination of the course and team activities was to also make use of new mobile paradigms. The program was to involve nine Purdue faculty members in three different departments with a total of 36 students working on the projects. The program was to be modeled after the EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) program (http://epics.ecn.purdue.edu/) at Purdue. For the second year of the program, we proposed to export our mobiltity effort to the EPICS program, allowing us to tie in with the rich set of applications with which EPICS teams are engaged. Our proposed schedule was to spend the Fall 2001 semester getting ready for the formal launch of the design course during the Spring 2002 semester.

How the project is actually coming to fruition

     In many respects, the project is coming to fruition exactly as we expected. The equipment arrived over the summer. At the start of the fall semester, we hired Maribel Figuera Alegre as the graduate teaching assistant for the project, and started to develop the concepts for the project course. Maribel’s responsibilities have included administering the hardware and developing a web page http://shay.ecn.purdue.edu/~mobility for the project, which contains a lot of information to help the students and faculty on the project get started. Ultimately, it will serve as a showcase for what the teams accomplish. We presented the proposed course plan to the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Curriculum Committee on Thursday, January 17, 2002. The response was very positive. However, the committee did request some changes, which have been made in the revised project course description which is attached to the accompanying proposal. This will be considered again by the Curriculum Committee at their meeting on Monday, January 28, 2002. The course will be first offered during the Fall 2002 semester. During the current semester, we have six teams comprising a total of 27 students organized and working on mobility projects. In lieu of our official course EE 495M Mobile Communications Project, which still needs final approval by the ECE Curriculum Committee, these students are all registered for either EE 496 Independent Project or EPICS.

Key findings

     Perhaps the most significant finding has been the almost unbelievable level of interest and support from both students and faculty members in this project. Even without widely advertising the project to the student body, news about it has spread by word of mouth among them; and we have had numerous inquiries. At this early stage in the project, we already have 43 students involved on project teams. In our 2001 proposal, we planned for a total of 36 students. Now it appears that we can increase that limit to about 50; but it seems certain that this will not meet the demand. Students are eager to learn about mobile technologies. They are also eager for an undergraduate research experience. They really enjoy the opportunity to interact one-on-one with faculty members, and to get to know them better. Finally, they are seeking opportunities to participate in design projects that involve teamwork and which address real applications. In short, students think that mobility is cool; and the opportunity to learn about it in the context of a design experience that involves teamwork is especially attractive.

Key stumbling blocks encountered

     The key stumbling block has been lack of space for a permanent laboratory where the teams can assemble to work on their projects. However, this issue will be resolved soon in a very positive way, as discussed in the accompanying proposal. An additional stumbling block has been lack of the availability or incompatibility of certain components of the mobile systems that we want to build. However, space does not permit a detailed discussion of these issues here.

Number of students engaged in curriculum utilizing mobile solutions

     The focus of our 2001 proposal was the development of a project course that would allow students to develop mobile solutions that would transform student life on campus, specifically printing. As discussed above, the course is not fully operational this semester because we do not yet have our laboratory facility. Nonetheless, we are moving ahead even without the facility. As of this week, a total of 43 students are registered for EE 496 or EPICS for the Spring 2002 semester, and are working on mobile solutions projects. One additional team is still being formed.

Number of faculty involved in the project

     Presently, there are nine faculty members actively involved in the project. They are Profs. Jan Allebach, Charles Bouman, Ed Delp, Leah Jamieson, Jim Krogmeier, Catherine Rosenberg, and Lynne Slivovsky, Luis Torres, all from Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Prof. George Chiu from Mechanical Engineering. By “actively involved”, we mean that each of these individuals is supervising a team of students, either individually, or with one or more other faculty members. Professor Ed Coyle continues to actively advise our project, as was planned in our 2001 proposal. Professors. Leah Jamieson and Lynne Slivosky are new to the project. They are supervising EPICS teams who are using mobile technologies. Professor Luis Torres is a visiting faculty member from University Polytechnic of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. He and Professor Ed Delp are co-supervising two teams of students. Professor Torres is supported by a NATO Fellowship. Two faculty members from Computer Science who were listed in the 2001 proposal are not supervising teams. They are Prof. Ahmed Elmagarmid who is on leave at HP in Palo Alto for the 2001-2002 academic year and Prof. Mike Atallah who is on sabbatical for the Spring 2002 semester. It is expected that these individuals will rejoin the project when they resume their campus duties in the Fall 2002.

How the student learning experience is transformed

     The traditional lecture course is heavily focused on learning fundamental, and often relatively theoretical, concepts on an individual basis, through largely passive assimilation of information from lecture, text, and other reference materials. In the traditional laboratory course, students learn by completing a carefully prescribed set of steps during each experiment, and then reporting their observations. While both these modes of learning will continue to play an important role in engineering and computer science education, our project course offers a completely different type of learning experience focused on mobility. In this framework, students must play a much more active and interactive role. They are in the driver’s seat, so to speak, rather than the course instructor, as is usually the case. They have an opportunity to set their own goals, and choose their own methods for achieving those goals. They must integrate what they have learned in more traditional courses with up-to-date information about mobile communications and wireless technology and the relevant application areas of multimedia documents, databases, video, and printing. They must also think about the actual use of these technologies by individuals who are part of the campus community or under-served populations in the larger community. That is, they must develop a customer focus. In addition to these benefits that are primarily focused on the students completing the project course, our efforts will also impact learning in the larger campus context, as our prototype solutions migrate from the laboratory out to the campus, and provide Purdue students with new access to mobile technologies, especially for printing.

Communication about the project at conferences or in publications

     We are planning to report on our activities at several different venues. First, Purdue University hosts an annual internal conference that highlights the development and implementation of new teaching technologies throughout the entire campus. This will be a great opportunity to raise awareness on campus of what we are doing. Secondly, professional societies such as the IEEE Signal Processing Society now have special sessions devoted to student papers. This will be the perfect venue to report on the technical significance of our work. Finally, the American Society for Engineering Education hosts an annual conference that is focused on advances in engineering education. Other societies, including the IEEE Signal Processing Society, regularly have special sessions on education within their respective technical disciplines. These will provide great opportunities to show how our team-based project framework for exploring mobile communications and printing provides both a mechanism for transforming campus life, and a framework for enhancing student learning by integrating theory, technology, and applications.

Indicators of advancement in student learning

     As pointed out earlier, we are only three weeks into the first semester of our student project course; so it is too early to say anything quantitative about course outcomes. Anecdotally, we are seeing that the students can very quickly get up to speed with learning about how to develop applications for the Jornada platform.

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Executive Summary

     We will develop a project-focused course and laboratory in which students will work together in teams to design applications of mobile technology that can transform campus life, and meet the needs of underserved populations in the community. Mobile applications related to printing will remain a special focus of the course projects. Projects involving community service will be carried out in the context of the award winning EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) program at Purdue. Current projects that will be continued include wireless communications and networking, security, e-services printing and printer management, and multimedia document re-purposing and printing. New projects will include the development of navigational aids for disabled students on campus, development of tools for collaborative drawing targeted for use by young girls to interest them in technology, and the development of a prototype system for team communication and client tracking to be used as a tool for Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) of the most seriously mentally ill individuals in our community.

The problem/opportunity to be addressed and its importance to the university's educational mission

     Mobile communications is rapidly transforming the way in which each of us goes about our daily lives. Mobile technologies provide an opportunity to significantly enhance the learning experience on campus. In addition, mobile technologies can have a profound impact on significant societal problems. The challenge here is two-fold. We want to develop the mobile applications that can transform campus life, and provide value to underserved populations in the community, while at the same time educating students in engineering and computer science about mobile technologies and the design process required to meaningfully bring these technologies to bear on real-world problems on the campus and in the community. At Purdue, two special opportunities exist: First, we can leverage our extensive research experience in printing by having a focus of our efforts be mobility and e-services as they relate to printing. Second, we can tap into the infrastructure of the nationally recognized EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) program that was started at Purdue, and which has received numerous awards and federal grants.

How the project team intends to address the problem/opportunity

     We will develop a project-centered course in Mobile Communications at Purdue. This course and its associated laboratory will provide a test bed for our students to engage in the design of solutions that use mobile technologies to transform campus life and address the needs of under-served populations in our community. The laboratory, which was not envisioned at the time when we submitted our 2001 grant request, will provide a focal point for the project activity. It will assure maximum accessibility of the HP-donated equipment to meet the needs of the project teams. It will also facilitate much more effective work and interaction by the team members. With a place to permanently set up breadboards and prototype hardware, develop software, and meet with other team members, the educational process will be greatly enhanced and team productivity in developing effective solutions will be significantly increased. Our formal course EE 495M Mobile Communications Project (see course documentation on pp. 5 and 6) will provide a structure for students to learn about mobile technologies and to experience firsthand the design process and the importance of a customer focus.

Project milestones expected to be achieved, with a timeline

• Occupy new Mobile Communications Projects laboratory - 15 March 2002
• Spring 2002 teams present their preliminary design plans - 15 March 2002
• Spring 2002 teams present final designs - 30 April 2002
• Delivery of equipment from 2002 grant request complete - 15 July 2002
• First offering of EE 495M Mobile Communications Project commences - 15 August 2002
• Fall 2002 teams present their preliminary design plans - 15 October 2002
• Fall 2002 teams present final designs - 10 December 2002
• Second offering of EE 495M Mobile Communications Project commences - 10 January 2003
• Presentation of paper on technical project results at 2003 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) April 2003
• Presentation of paper on program structure and methodology at 2003 American Society of Engineering
• Educators Frontiers in Education Conference November 2003

What the institution is prepared to invest in the project

     Purdue has already committed an extensive investment of resources to the mobile communications project. First, despite a severe shortage of space within the Schools of Engineering which will not be alleviated until the new Nanotechnology Center comes on line in Purdue’s new Discovery Park in a few years, and the new Millennium Engineering Building is completed about 10 years from now, the Dean of the Schools of Engineering has provided 644 square feet of space for a laboratory dedicated exclusively to uses associated with the mobility project. Second, the Dean of the Schools of Engineering has committed $13,204 to prepare and furnish the space with 14 3 ft. x 6 ft lab benches, chairs, a conference table, and partitions. The proposed lab layout is shown in Fig. 1. Each team will be permanently assigned a lab bench on which they can spread out their equipment and documentation. The conference area will be used for meetings between team members and with clients.
     Third, the Head of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) invested a total of $38,345 to purchase 12 HP Vectra VL800 MT P4 computers with 17 inch HP L1720 LCD displays and one HP color LaserJet 4550N printer for the lab. Each lab bench will hold one of the Vectras, which will be used by the teams for software development. (We also received two Vectras from HP, as part of our 2001 grant.) Fourth, since the start of the Fall 2001 semester, the Head of the School of ECE also has provided the support for our teaching assistant Maribel Figuera Alegre, who has been assigned to the mobility project. Finally, pending approval by the ECE Curriculum Committee, the School of ECE will be committing instructional resources in the form of several faculty members’ time to staff the mobility course and supervise the project teams.
     The Schools of Engineering tuition differential fee annually generates resources that we will be able to request to enable us to continue to keep the laboratory equipment up to date. As an example, in 2001, we received tuition-differential funds to support the installation of a camera-man system and video server in the HPsponsored Video and Image Systems Engineering (VISE) lab (www.purdue.edu/VISE) that will enable us to capture and make available on the web in streaming video format, all instruction that takes place in this facility.

Products, services or other support needed to complete the project

The equipment we are requesting will strengthen our existing projects, and will enable the expansion of our activities into the realm of community service by supporting three EPICS teams to develop solutions to provide campus access for individuals with disabilities, collaborative drawing tools for getting young girls immersed in technology and interested in careers in technology, and a mobile communications testbed for teams of professionals treating individuals with serious mental illness in our community.
     In the remainder of this section, we provide a brief justification for the equipment. Our 2001 grant request included mostly handheld Jornadas and very few pocket Jornadas., In addition, we requested only three laptop computers. As our projects are getting under way, we are seeing a lot of demand from the students to be able to work with the pocket Jornadas. Also, it is apparent that each team needs to have one laptop computer for use as a mobile base for giving multimedia presentations and generation of documentation during meetings, both in the lab and in the field. In addition, the laptops are themselves an important instance of mobile technology to be integrated with the solutions that these teams are developing. So we are requesting more pocket Jornadas and more laptop computers. In addition, our 2001 grant request included several thin Netservers, which came configured without disks and with minimal memory. We are requesting disk drives and additional memory; so that these machines can more usefully support our project activities. We are also requesting Bluetooth cards that were not available for Jornadas when we submitted our 2001 grant request, and cash for Flash cards to upgrade the memory of our Jornadas. Our students are already complaining that they lack sufficient memory to effectively develop applications for the Jornadas. The GPS cards are for the navigational aids for disabled students. The large format printer will be used by the collaborative drawing team for output of drawings generated by the focus groups of young girls, and also by all teams for preparation of presentation materials. Finally, we are requesting pocket cameras, two VGA cards, and some smart pens to support exploration of a range of mobile imaging applications.

How this project relates to the current project

     This project builds on the current project in two important ways. First, the technical activities of the current project that were described in the 2001 proposal will be continued. These include the efforts in wireless communications and networking, security, e-services and printer management, and multimedia document repurposing.and printing. Printing will continue to be a major focal point of the projects. However, the availability of our new laboratory facility will allow these projects to proceed in a much more effective manner than would have been previously possible. In addition, based on our early experience through the fall, we have identified a number of critical needs for equipment to support the current project, that this project will address. These include more pocket series Jornadas, more laptops, so that each team will have one, disk drives for the servers, and a large format plotter for preparation of posters and other materials needed to communicate the results of the projects to the campus community, and the national and international research and education communities. Thus the resources committed by Purdue and the equipment requested in the current proposal will greatly strengthen the existing projects.      Secondly, as planned for Year 2 in our 2001 proposal, the proposed project broadens the scope of our mobility effort to encompass three new projects that will be conducted in the context of EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service). These include a project conducted by the Integrating Women in Technology (IWT) team involving collaborative drawing, a project conducted by the Office of the Dean of Students (ODOS) team involving mobile navigational aids for disabled students to help them identify handicapped access routes between any two points on campus, and a project involving mobile communication services for PACT (Program for Assertive Community Treatment) teams that work with the most seriously mentally ill people in our community. These projects will be synergistic with the current projects in that they all will leverage technologies that are being developed in the existing projects. For example, security will be a major issue for the PACT teams. The navigational services provided for disabled students will have a significant printing component, since disabled students will be able to print a map showing their recommended route. The final result of the collaborative drawing effort will be a large format print. Again, it is apparent that printing is a strong thread through all of these activities.

Any anticipated third party involvement

     During the next year, we will be seeking sponsorship from other companies to support the Mobile Communications project course and laboratory. These will be companies whose interests, products, and strengths complement those of HP, and with whom we already have existing relationships. Examples include Cisco, Digimarc, Microsoft, and Thomson Consumer Electronics. We also will apply for a three year $150,000 Curriculum Development grant from Proctor and Gamble to provide faculty release time for further development of the mobility curriculum. That proposal is due on January 31, 2002, with awards being announced by May 31, 2002.
     The project on wireless communications and networking will take advantage of resources provided by a $198,977 NSF grant (with a $99,489 match from Purdue) entitled “Instrumentation for Communications Research in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networking” and a pending $1.7M grant from the 21st Century Fund of the state of Indiana to establish an Indiana Center for Wireless Communications and Networking at Purdue in partnership with Notre Dame University, Thomson Consumer Electronics, Delphi Delco, and ITT Defense Industries.
     The third EPICS project focusing on developing mobile solutions for treatment teams to communicate with each other and monitor services for individuals with serious mental illness in the community will be a partnership with NAMI West Central Indiana, our local affiliate of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. In 2001, NAMI WCI became the first NAMI affiliate in the nation to receive a grant of $150,000 from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) agency to lead a consensus building process in our community to plan for the formation of a team to provide Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) of the most seriously mentally ill (and often homeless) individuals in our community. ACT is an evidence-based practice, which means that its efficacy has been established through controlled experimentation. In contrast, many of the paradigms currently used to treat the mentally ill are not evidenced-based. The consensus-building process will last for one year, and will be followed by a second phase during which the actual implementation of ACT services will take place. Our EPICS team will work along side of the participants in this process to understand in detail their needs for mobile communication and information management. They will use this information to prototype a solution that will allow team members to keep in touch, and have vital information at their fingertips, as they move about the community working with mentally ill clients.

EE 495M MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS PROJECT

January 25, 2002
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