Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving a talk and a tutorial at GKmM Summer School 2008. The GKmM Summer School is a highly selective summer program that brings the brightest minds around Europe together. Held at a remote castle in Germany, participants focus on heterogeneous networks, discuss the state of the art of sensing, and formulate new ideas and interesting applications. The program was very well run and had a good mix of lectures from unmanned vehicle control to wireless sensor networks. Most of the lectures were academic with interesting novel applications -- a very cool underwater unmanned manaray, for example.

My lectures took a little different approach; I focused on how pervasive computing was being used in the real world. The first talk covered applications like emergency response, logistics, and energy management. I've deployed applications in all of these areas, and discussed what it takes to implement a real-world pervasive system. I talked about my experience with the Sentilla platform and how it enables these applications and reduces time to market.

In my second session, I gave a hands-on lab demonstrating the Sentilla platform. In the three hours allotted for this tutorial the students were introduced to the Sentilla Perk Kit hardware and software including the Sentilla tools, mote architecture, debugging techniques and architecture schemes for building applications using Java on a resource-constrained device. Once the architecture was covered we moved on to how to define a sensor, using the accelerometer and the temperature sensor in the JCreate as examples. By the end of this tutorial all 8 groups were building real-world applications like a digital dice game, shown on Sentilla Labs, to an emergency beacon that could be used in search and rescue.

For more information on the GKmM Summer School here is the main page. It was great to see how quickly the participants picked up pervasive computing and built applications, and I'm excited to participate in more summer schools in the future.