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TUTORIAL X
Opportunities and Challenges in Pervasive Computing
Raju Pandey
University of California, Davis

Audience: This tutorial is meant for core Computer Science researchers, educators and students, and applied computational sciences researchers (including engineers, environmental scientists, agriculture experts, and other application developers) who are interested in understanding the opportunities and challenges that pervasive computing environments offer.

Course Description: There is increasing interest in the next generation of distributed systems that include a large number of embedded sensors, actuators and MEMS devices. Such systems, called variously as pervasive, ubiquitous, or networks of embedded systems in literature, include heterogeneous collections of devices that are embedded in their physical environment and that interact with the environment, gather information, perform local computations, and communicate with other devices and hosts. Pervasive systems allows tight integration of the physical world with a computing system infrastructure, thereby permitting better information sensing, access, and control. The primary goal of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive overview of the pervasive computing area to both Computer Science researchers and application developer community. For Computer Science researchers, this tutorial will address how characteristics of pervasive environments (such as resource constraints, connectivity and configuration, scalability, fault tolerance and security concerns) require novel solutions for many traditional distributed systems problems. For application developers, this tutorial will illustrate how this exciting technology can be used to build novel applications in agriculture, environmental sciences, engineering, medicine, disaster recovery and response, and smart computing environments. The tutorial is divided into four segments. First, it will discuss the computational, communication and sensor characteristics of the various devices currently available. Second, it will describe the networking techniques for constructing a communication infrastructure among ubiquitous devices. The tutorial will discuss several classes of sensor network routing algorithms, and their applicability within different application domains. Third, the tutorial will highlight the operating system, middleware, and programming language support needed for integrating a large number of devices into a secure, fault tolerant and adaptive distributed computing environment. Finally, the tutorial will discuss the issues in building and deploying new classes of applications within a pervasive computing environment.

Lecturer: Raju Pandey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at University of California, Davis. He received his B. Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1984, an M.S. in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995. His research interests are primarily in distributed systems, operating systems, networking, and pervasive computing. Dr. Pandey is a member of ACM and a member of IEEE-CS.