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Final report

Objectives:

The objective of the summer school was to expand the co-operation between the PARC research center at Palo Alto and the chair of embedded systems at the University of Passau. The co-operation goes back to a two month visit  of a group member (Kai Kunze) from the University of Passau in Palo Alto as well as a following visit of the group leader Paul Lukowicz in spring 2005.

Specific Characteristics:

The PARC research center is not a university, so students are part of it. However PARC works a lot with 'interns'. Thereby 'interns' are students who work on a research project for a few month at the PARC laboratories. Working together with famous US scientists is also an important factor of PARC's work. So the objective of this summer school – in contrast to the aim of many other summer schools – wasn't to bring students from California and Bavaria together. PARC is unable to bring their own students. Instead, the objective was to extend the institutional co-operation between the University of Passau and PARC by bringing together members and co-operation partners of both bodies. For PARC it was also very important to make contact with interested students. Finally the main objective was to induct students and Ph. D. students to the topic of Pervasive Healthcare by top  international experts.

Problems:

Dirk Palafanz, the PARC contact who was responsible for Pervasive Healthcare and consequently for the summer school's set-up, left PARC three month before the start of the summer school.  This has complicated the organization and reduced the PARC contribution to the summer school.

Summer school's process:

All in all more then 30 students and Ph. D. students have attended the summer school. On the part of PARC the invited speakers have been Dr. Dorrit Billmann, Prof. Joe Paridiso and Prof. Thad Starner. The University of Passau invited as speakers Prof. Paul Lukowicz (University of  Passau), Prof. Rheinhold Haux (University of Braunschweig), Prof. Christian Haring (PKH Hall, Tirol), Gunnar Faberger (Swedish Handicapped Institute, Schweden), Mathias Brucke (OFFIS Hannover) and Dr. Rene Mayrhofer (University of Linz).

Results:

There have been the following concrete results concerning the co-operation between PARC and the University of Passau

• A special edition of the journal "Methods of Information in Medicine" which is edited in collaboration by Prof. Lukowicz (University of Passau) and  Dr. Bellmann (PARC) is under way.
• A corporate project about activity monitoring has been defined. This project should be carried out during the next two years and in doing so scientist from Passau should visit PARC and also the other way round. A BaCaTec proposal concerning to this is under preparation.