Software Engineering for Pervasive Computing: An Outlook for Educational Reform

Pervasive human-centric computing, the emerging next-generation computing, focuses on humans rather than machines. Pervasive computing's goal of "all the time, everywhere" access replaces today's mobile and distributed computing's goal of "anytime, anywhere" access. Pervasive computing requires cross-disciplinary collaborations among experts in fields such as intelligent systems, agent technologies, autonomic computing, security and privacy, human factors engineering and ergonomics, human factors psychology, augmented reality computing, wearable computing, wireless and mobile computing, location-and context-aware computing, sensor computing, device technology, and social sciences. Thus, it is crucial to reform software engineering education in order to well prepare software engineers for the new challenges and opportunities presented by pervasive human-centric computing. This paper presents and discusses our project results and the lessons learned about the software engineering education reform