Manfred Huber University of Texas Arlington "An Active, Collaborative Learning Program in Smart Home Technologies"
This project provides opportunities for students, through the transfer of knowledge advances from research in Smart Home technologies, to engage in educational experiences that prepare them for the workforce in the expanding area of embedded, smart systems. The project focuses on the upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate curricula at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) and Texas Christian University (TCU). The curriculum developments enabled by this project draw from expertise in the computer science and the engineering departments of both institutions and are also used to augment courses within various engineering disciplines. New course elements developed in this project incorporate state-of-the-art advances in fields such as Machine Learning, Requirements Modeling, Product Development Processes, Mobile robotics, and Multi-agent systems. Smart Home technology provides a vehicle to investigate and integrate these diverse topics and thus represents an environment suitable for cross-disciplinary team projects in which students with different expertise learn to cooperate to address a task. A Smart Home lab at UTA and a similar lab (Smart Frog Condo) at TCU are equipped with a variety of sensors and devices to provide hands-on experiences for students. These two similar labs permit experiments to be largely interchangeable to ensure the most efficient use of resources and available expertise at the two universities.
