ETH Zurich

Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH Zurich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich)
is ranked among the top technical universities worldwide. The department of Computer Science has a strong tradition in both information management and systems engineering. It hosts five institutes (Computer Systems, Information Systems, Pervasive Computing, Theoretical Computer Science and Computational Science) as well as independent chairs in Software Engineering and Information Security. The department has 30 Professors, around 250 full-time staff and more than 1000 students.

The Global Information Systems research group (GlobIS) is investigating how platforms to support mobile and ubiquitous computing can be developed based on advanced database technologies with integrated support for context-dependent information delivery. Rather than being simple repositories of data, databases are used as central system components that actively control environments, constantly acquiring information from hardware and software sensors about the state of the environment and generating outputs either in response to explicit requests or triggered events. The group currently has a number of projects focussing on mobile environments, while others are investigating indoor environments such as intelligent labs.

Within the European project Paper++, the group developed an open hypermedia system that provides the basic infrastructure necessary to support cross-media publishing. The system, called iServer, is based on a generic link framework that enables any form of media to be integrated through a plug-in mechanism. Currently, plug-ins are available for digitally augmented paper based on Paper++ technologies, XHTML documents and video. These allow not only entire resources to be linked, but also elements within resources as specified through appropriate selector mechanisms. In the case of digitally augmented paper, selectors are defined as active areas within paper pages. To investigate the use of paper in mobile environments, the group developed an application based around an interactive paper map and event programme to support tourists visiting the Edinburgh international festivals. Interaction is based on a combination of Anoto technologies to interact with paper and voice dialogue. Initial user studies were carried out during the festivals held in August 2004 and 2005.