Course Schedule and Content |
Teacher:
Office Hours: Sunday, 13:00 - 15:00, Ross 81
Lectures:
There is a newsgroup for the course, local.course.postPC, intended for free discussion among the students.
The course mailbox, postPC@cs.huji.ac.il, is open to your questions, remarks, requests, wishes, and complaints. You may also use email to postPC for submitting assignments.
Please do not send course-related e-mail to my personal mailbox.
The course sessions will be split between lectures and discussion and review of the ongoing projects. Each project for this course should identify a potential product or service opportunity in "postPC computing", exploiting the technological and infrastructure potential of the next five years. You will then analyze the technical requirements of the opportunity, determine budgets for size, power, computing performance, bandwidth and storage, and test the usability with "low fidelity" prototypes. The course lab will offer the opportunity to build function into the prototypes using presently available wearable computing accessories. Proposed products will be presented to the class and to outside reviewers at the end of the term. The projects will be best done in small teams of 2-3 students.
Assignment 1 (due 19.3.02): Review the "vision documents" by Vannevar Bush, the Depp/IBM team, and the Bluetooth scenarios, and think about what you would like to do as a project in this course. Submit a paragraph describing what problem you want to solve, for whom, and with what technologies.
Assignment 2 (due 21.4.02): Final proposal. Update your project proposal documents along the lines discussed in class -- Be clear about who is the customer and what problem they wish to solve, specify the tasks that need to be accomplished to solve at least the simplest form of this problem, in narrative or scenario form. These tasks will give us a reference for quantifying the technology needed as well as a basis for usability testing, so be specific! And tell me what technology components you are assessing to see when the project will be feasible -- we will iterate on this part in the next weeks.
Assignment 3 (due 19.5.02): Technology assessment report
Assignment 4 (due 16.6.02): Report on useability testing
Final project presentations: either 25.6.02 or 2.7.02
The final course grade will be based equally on the technology assessment, the usability testing, and the final presentations.