9451190 Lee A research platform developed at the University of Pennsylvania, "teleconferenced workstations", expands a cutting-edge curriculum in Telecommunications and Systems at Penn. "Teleconferenced workstations" are a unique mode of communication currently being used by members of the AURORA Gigabit Testbed, which connects Penn, MIT, IBM Research, and Bell Communications Research. The test bed service provision includes support for multimedia and Teleconferencing. We will use and experiment with this technology as part of a new course entitled "Distributed and Real-time Systems", as well as in an existing course entitled "Telecommunications networks". The courses not only discuss the principles behind the technology, but have a carefully constructed laboratory component with projects that apply the concepts covered in lectures to components of the prototyped system at Penn. This will not only augment our current curriculum in Telecommunications and Systems, but will serve as an excellent vehicle to evaluate the effectiveness of the teleconferenced workstation environment.
