Fleas, Caterpillars and Cockroaches: A Summer School in Bio-inspired Robotics

There is no doubt that the coming decades will see a continued increase in the application of robotics in our daily lives. It is vital that we encourage more young people to pursue careers in STEM fields and in particular, robotics. Universities can play their part by running events that allow participants to explore the field of robotics through hands-on projects. In this paper our experiences in designing and running a bio-inspired robotics summer school for young women is described. The summer school was successful and we have made the teaching and learning materials available for others to use

Adaptive resource discovery for ubiquitous computing

The terms pervasive and ubiquitous computing are used to describe a smart space populated by hundreds of intelligent devices that are embedded in their surroundings. Characteristically, ubiquitous computing devices must blend into the background, unobtrusively collaborating to provide value-added services for users. Services are thus essential to the success of this technology and, as a result, both service discovery and service management will play a vital role in generating the revenue stream that is a prerequisite for sustainable ubiquitous deployment. On the one hand, the services provided should be evident by their richness and variety and on the other, the complexity inherent in the environment must be hidden from users. In this paper, we describe RUBI, a resource discovery framework for ubiquitous computing. RUBI represents a novel approach to resource discovery, because the primacy of the need for adaptive autonomic behaviour is established within its design. Copyright 2004 ACM

SPIZ: An Effective Service Discovery Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) require special care in the handling of service advertisement and discovery (Ad/D). In this paper, we propose a noble service Ad/D technique for MANETs. Our scheme avoids redundant flooding and reduces the system overhead by integrating Ad/D with routing layer. It also tracks changing conditions, such as traffic and service popularity levels. Based on a variable zone radius, we have combined push-based Ad/D with a pull-based Ad/D strategy