Disconnected Browsing : WWW & Mobile Computing

Anupam Joshi, Purdue University

The objective of this tutorial will be to familiarize the audience with the basics as well as the state of the art in disconnected browsing. We use this term to describe both the general aspects of accessing distributed multimedia data from limited capability and bandwidth platforms, as well as the specifics of browsing the Web from mobile (wirelessly networked) computers. The issues involved here lead to challenging problems in research that need to be addressed by the community, as well as interesting practical systems that will be useful in everything from battlefield management, tele-medicine, and education, inter alia. We will begin the tutorial from a general overview of the challenges posed by mobile systems to a wide variety of computer science disciplines, such as networking, data management, user interfaces etc. We will describe how the problems in these areas affect disconnected information browsing. We will also provide a short overview of the Web -- http, html and Java. Using the web as an example, we will describe and analyze the issues involved in creating systems for disconnected browsing. These involve mobile client server and proxy-scion architectures, disconnection management, information fusion, cooperative information gathering and multimedia transformation. We will describe application scenario, and conclude with a critical review of systems, including those worked on by the instructor, such as InfoPad, SciencePad, Odyssey, and Milktruck.

Biographical Sketch

Anupam Joshi is a (Visiting) Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences at Purdue University, from where he received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1993. His research interests span the broad areas of computational intelligence, distributed AI and Networked/Mobile computing. He works on using AI/CI techniques to help in the creation of Intelligent, Ubiquitous Problem Solving Environments. Allowing such systems to be accessible from mobile platforms is an important aspect of this work, and is supported by an NSF award to Profs. Houstis and Joshi. He is also the PI of a grant from Intel which seeks to address related problems in disconnected browsing - mobile access to distributed data such as that on the Web. This effort collaborates with the work being done by Profs. Elmagarmid and Helal in multidatabases and mobile systems. His other interests include computational vision and computer mediated (distance) learning. For the last 2 semesters, he has taught a seminar course in mobile computing at Purdue, and received 5.0/5.0 on student evaluations. He is a member of IEEE, IEEE-CS, ACM and UPE.