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TUTORIAL II
Title: Pervasive Computing and Communications
Mohan Kumar
The University of Texas at Arlington

Audience: Senior undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and computing engineering and researchers in networking, distributed computing and AI. In addition to networking and distributed systems developers, this tutorial is relevant to application developers in embedded systems, 3G and beyond wireless systems, smart homes/offices, telemedicine.

Course Description: Pervasive computing technologies and associated software are being employed to facilitate such applications as telemedicine, education, space endeavors, manufacturing, crisis management, transportation, and defense for all the time and everywhere use. In pervasive computing environments, hardware and software entities are expected to function autonomously, continually and correctly. Recent advances in hardware, software agents, and middleware technologies have been mainly responsible for the emergence of pervasive computing as perhaps the most exciting area of computing in recent times. Pervasive computing encompasses mobile computing and distributed computing and more – agent technologies, middleware, situation-aware computing etc. Pervasive computing is about providing ‘where you want, when you want, what you want and how you want’ services to users, applications and devices. There have been many outstanding papers in recent years, highlighting the challenges of pervasive computing. These issues and challenges can be listed as - invisibility, interoperability and heterogeneity, proactivity, mobility, intelligence and security.

The tutorial consists of an overview of pervasive computing. This will be followed by motivation and some examples of pervasive computing applications. Research topics and application areas will be discussed briefly. The topics include: Introduction to pervasive computing; Issues and challenges in pervasive computing - Heterogeneity and interoperability, Transparency and proactivity, Mobility and location-awareness, Agents, proxies and profiles, Networking issues, service discovery, and Information push/pull; Overview of ongoing projects and discussion on new applications.

Lecturer(s): Mohan Kumar is an Associate Professor in Computer Science in Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington.  His current research interests include, pervasive computing, wireless networks and mobility, active networks, mobile agents, and distributed computing. Recently, he has developed or co-developed algorithms for active-network based routing and multicasting in wireless networks and prefetching in mobile distributed computing. He has supervised or (co-)supervising PhD (past-6, current-6) theses in the areas of pervasive computing, caching/prefetching, active networks, wireless networks and mobility. Kumar has published over 100 refereed articles in journals and conference proceedings and received funding in excess of $3M. Kumar is a senior member of the IEEE, he is one of the cofounders of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing (PerCom), served as the Program Chair for PerCom 2003 and is the General Chair for PerCom 2005. He is on the editorial board of The Computer Journal and has guest (or co-guest) edited several special issues of leading international journals. Mohan obtained his Ph.D (1992) and MTech (1985) from the Indian Institute of Science in 1992 and 1985 respectively and the BE (1982) from the Bangalore University.  In the past he served as a faculty at Curtin University of Technology, Perth,  Australia (1992-2000) and during 1986-82, and as a scientific officer at the Indian Institute of Science (1986-1992).