ITR: Technologies for Sensor-based Wireless Networks of Toys for Smart Developmental Problem-solving Environments

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Despite enormous progress in networking and computing technologies, their application has remained restricted to conventional person-to-person and person-to-computer communication. However, the Moore's Law driven continual reduction in cost and form factor is now making it possible to imbed networking - even wireless networking - and computing capabilities not just in our PCs and laptops but also other objects. Further, a marriage of these ever tinier and cheaper processors and wireless network interfaces with emerging micro-sensors based on MEMS technology is allowing cheap sensing, processing, and communication capabilities to be unobtrusively embedded in familiar physical objects. The result is an emerging paradigm shift where the primary role of information technology would be to enhance or assist in "person to physical world" communication via familiar physical objects with embedded (a) micro-sensors to react to external stimuli, and (b) wireless networking and computing engines for tetherless communication with compute servers and other networked embedded objects. The proposed research seeks to explore wireless networking, middleware, and data management technologies for realizing the above vision. The problems of ad hoc structure, distributed nature, unreliable sensing, large scale/density, and novel sensor data types are characteristic of such deeply instrumented physical environments with inter-networked physical objects. This requires one to rethink current architectures, protocols, algorithms, and formalisms that were developed for different needs. Further, to provide a concrete problem domain, we propose to use and evaluate our technologies in a "smart kindergarten" driver application targeted at developmental problem-solving environments for early childhood education. This is a natural application as young children learn by exploring and interacting with objects such as toys in their environment. Our envisioned system would enhance the education process by providing a childhood learning environment that is individualized to each child, adapts to the context, coordinates activities of multiple children, and allows unobtrusive evaluation of the learning process by the teacher. This would be done by wirelessly-networked, sensor-enhanced toys with back-end middleware services and database techniques. The main information technology contributions of this research would be: Wireless protocols for networks using short-range radios, with focus on highly unstructured, dynamic, and dense networks of embedded devices, and problems of energy efficiency and quality of service needs of sensor data. Network architectures designed for naming, addressing, and routing by object capabilities and attributes, as opposed to id based approaches in conventional networks. Efficient techniques and algorithms for identifying, locating, and tracking users and objects in instrumented environments, particularly indoors. Middleware architecture providing services such as special communication patterns, context-aware network resource allocation and scheduling under attribute and capacity constraints, power-aware operation, media processing using shared background servers, and context discovery, tracking, and change notification. Data management methods to handle data from multiple heterogeneous, unreliable, noisy sensors in a highly dynamic environment, with support for real-time sensor data interpretation and fusion, and off-line mining. Automated mining of user profiles from sensor data, and their use in task planning and execution of actions in the instrumented environment Techniques for sensor-assisted automatic speech recognition of children's speech.Complementing the above will be the driver application where a Smart Kindergarten for developmental problem solving will be prototyped based on the above ideas, and evaluated in a real classroom setting. Various objects, particularly toys, will be wirelessly networked and have sensing and perhaps actuator capabilities. A wireless network, with radios and protocols suitable for handling a high density of proximate objects, will interconnect the toys to each other and to database and compute servers using a toy network middleware API. Sensors embedded in toys and worn by children will allow the database servers to discover and track context and configuration information about the children and the toys, and also orchestrate aural, visual, motion, tactile and other feedback. The system will enhance the developmental process by providing a problem-solving environment that is individualized, context adaptive, and coordinated among multiple children. It will also allow monitoring and logging for unobtrusive paper-free assessment by teacher or parent.The project team is interdisciplinary, with researchers from UCLA's CS and EE Departments for the technology component of the project, and from UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences (GSE&IS) for the application component. GSE&IS operates a reputed laboratory elementary school on campus, which will be used for real-life evaluation of