Mobile Intelligence

6.6 AGENTS, PERVASIVE COMPUTING, AND EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY

Pervasive computing refers to a branch in computer science that focuses on bringing technological advances to the daily activities of users. In another words, pervasive computing explores the task of integrating technology into the user's environment, with the purpose of proactively performing jobs and lightening the user's workload. In pervasive computing, computers work in the background to make pervasively accessed information and services available to users based on some intelligent knowledge. Pervasive computing envisions an environment saturated with computing and communication capability gracefully integrated with human users. Access to information and services such as envisioned by the pervasive computing trend requires the use of intelligent entities as well as cooperation between the devices or systems involved. In a pervasive environment, a user should always be connected to the computing resources, whether it is mobile or stationary. The introduction of small wireless wearable devices, embedded systems, Bluetooth technology, and others, lie at the heart of the recent interests in pervasive computing and represent the driving force behind the advances in the field. The goal of pervasive computing requires any such applications to subsist in an environment that is heterogeneous and distributed. The information and services, which must be made available to users, may reside in any device and location; moreover, ...