Report on the First Summer School on Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing

Alastair Beresford, Csaba Kiss Kalló, Ursula Kretschmer, Friedemann Mattern, Martin Muehlenbrock

Abstract

The 2002 Summer School on Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing was organized and run by a team of volunteers from ETH Zurich between 7th and 14th of August. It was situated at Dagstuhl Castle in Germany. More than 120 applications from all over the world were received for the sixty available places. The lecturers were John Barton, Nigel Davies, Anind Dey, Hans Werner Gellersen, Marc Langheinrich, Friedemann Mattern, and Thad Starner.

The goal of the summer school was to provide a basic survey of the most relevant subfields, present the perspectives and the underlying technologies, identify the pertinent issues within the field and identify important research themes. The summer school was organized into eighteen ninetyminute lectures, three participant workshops and three group work sessions. There was a good diversity in lecture topics, covering hardware technology and sensor systems, middleware components, ubiquitous application examples and relevant theory.

Most lecturers stayed for the duration of the summer school, initiating impromptu discussions on a wide variety of related topics as well as providing useful and expert advice on individuals' research dissertations. The summer school has provided a mechanism for meeting other, budding new researchers starting in the field of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. This will undoubtedly provide greater awareness of work at other universities, and a wealth of contacts attendees can draw on in future years to further their own research.