FLAGELLA: A VIRULENCE FACTOR OF BURKHOLDERIA PSEUDOMALLEI Y.Y. Chan, Y.H. Gan and K.L. Chua Departme

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Electronic Student Notebook
Albert Huang, albert_at_csail.mit.edu Thomas
Doeppner, twd_at_cs.brown.edu Larry Rudolph,
rudolph_at_csail.mit.edu
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, MIT
Department of Computer Science, Brown University
ABSTRACTThe use of technology as an effective
educational tool has been an elusive goal in the
past. Specifically, previous attempts at using
small personal computers in the classroom to aid
students as collaborative and note-taking tools
have been met with lukewarm responses. Many of
these past attempts were hampered by inferior
hardware and the lack of an efficient and
user-friendly interface. With the recent
introduction of Tablet PC products on the market,
however, the limitations imposed on software
developers for mobile computing systems have been
dramatically lowered. We present a collaborative
annotation system that allows students equipped
with tablet computers to work cooperatively in
either an ad-hoc or a structured wireless
classroom setting.
Ad-hoc collaboration allows any number of users
to share and annotate documents with each other
in an ad hoc network. No central application
server is required to collaborate, and all
communication is done in a peer-to-peer fashion.
A group of students could meet in a lounge
without a network infrastructure and, using their
tablets in ad-hoc mode, collaborate as easily as
if they were in class. Documents and annotations
are efficiently multicasted to participating
users, taking care to minimize redundant traffic.
Security guarantees privacy and confidentiality
when taking down and exchanging notes. Each user
must authenticate with a personal certificate
before being given a symmetric key used by all
participants to encrypt transmitted messages.
Pen annotations provide a natural and intuitive
interface for the user to jot down thoughts and
notes. The ink used can be customized to
various widths, colors, and opacities to simulate
a range of writing utensils.
Robust document support A wide variety of
documents can be imported into the system and
annotated, including Word, PowerPoint, Acrobat,
HTML, image files, etc. Students are able to
browse to a web page using the built-in browser,
import it into the system, and immediately begin
annotating the web page.
Document data and structure preservation As much
document data as possible is preserved when
documents are imported. Hyperlinks and geometry
information are preserved when possible.
Historical Context Lookup After jotting down some
quick notes, a student might forget what she
meant when she drew that cryptic diagram. When
reviewing annotations later on at night, she can
request context information about a certain note.
Information and events related to that note are
made available, hopefully triggering her memory.
Audio recordings can be integrated into the
history.

• Future Research
• Deployment in a number of science and humanities
  classes to evaluate effectiveness
• Integration with existing Project Oxygen
  technologies
• Collaboration with the ReMarkable Texts, Mobile
  projects at Brown University