TAP Collaborative Projects

Collaborative projects are the vehicle for turning interesting emerging technologies into innovations that advance the university's mission. TAP co-charters these projects with partner areas in ITS and the university in order to assess emerging technologies in the context of the mission of the partner areas. The ultimate outcomes of these collaborations are joint learning, knowledge transfer, and partnerships that provide leadership in realizing the university's strategic goals.

The TAP Collaborative Project Approach

The power of TAP's collaborative projects comes from strong collaborators. Each partner brings expertise and resources to the table that synergize with TAP's core emerging technology tracking and project activities.

Collaborative projects leverage capabilities developed in the core projects as well as vendor inputs and expertise from partner areas to develop innovative solutions. TAP works with partners to identify prototype applications, charters projects around these services, and shares in prototyping the applications for assessment. Successful prototypes then deploy to a living lab for assessment in an actual user environment. For more information on collaborative projects contact Michael Shoffner.

Memex Metadata (M²) Project

M² is a collaboration with the Metadata Research Center (MRC) at UNC's School of Information and Library Science (SILS). M² is supported by a research grant from Microsoft Research. MRC's M² project page has more details.

M² explores the application of context awareness to metadata about personal educational archives. The seminal vision for this project is Vannevar Bush's Memex, which is a notional memory augmentation device that supports storage and retrieval of everything that a user ever sees, hears, and reads.

M² TAP Talk presentation project overview and technology overview are available.

The Horizon Project

The Horizon Project is a collaboration with ITS's Teaching & Learning area and Horizon Wimba, a leading higher education e-learning vendor.

The purpose of the Horizon Project is to pilot technologies for improving pedagogical outcomes by supporting greater classroom interactivity and collaborative learning. These technologies include context awareness, smart room capabilities, software agents, social software, and Memex.

RFID Asset Tracking (RAT) Project

RAT is a collaboration with the ITS User Support & Engagement Walk-in Services group.

RAT is a pilot project to investigate asset tracking with RFID technology for possible broader use in ITS and on campus. Walk-in Services is responsible for maintaining a large number of notebook computers. Currently, inventory is maintained by manual entry into the Remedy system. An automated asset tracking system employing RFID technology would likely reduce the amount of work necessary to maintain inventory, and at the same time increase accounting accuracy.

Smart Room Integration (SRI) Project

SRI is a collaboration with ITS's Teaching & Learning area and a leading room automation vendor.

SRI involves piloting technologies for exposing classroom services using a pervasive computing framework, adding context awareness, and making them available to software agents working on behalf of faculty and students. Room services include projectors, window shades, room audio, and other devices as well as e-learning applications.