2025-11-18 –, Hodler
CPILS (Cyber-Physical Immersive Learning Spaces) is a learning environment with lots of purely digital (software) and cyber-physical (devices) interactions. CPILS is designed to be operated under the full souvereignty of students, without reliance on Internet services or electrical power supply. It is a fully packaged environment with locally operated Kubernetes and AI services that adapts to the current and predicted supply of electricity. Thus, it offers value to students on field trips, but also in regions affected by power outages, and conveys the topic of digital souvereignty and sustainability to students in a hands-on manner. This session first explains the CPILS concepts, and then offers an onsite demonstration.
Irreversible societal issues ranging from sustainability to disaster management require a highly skilled workforce with domain knowledge but also technological competences. New competence-oriented, hands-on learning tools are required to ensure a high availability of such specialists, especially on the intersection of digital skills (e.g., system control, programming, content creation) and real-world skills (e.g., technology use in remote areas and nature). One class of such learning tools are cyber-physical immersive learning spaces that simulate, project or otherwise convey real-world problems. Such learning spaces take the spatial dimension into account, allowing for location-based operation indoors as well as in remote areas with physical movement, also offsetting health and concentration issues typically associated with screentime and e-learning. In addition to collaborative learning with people, AI tools complement the learning experience.
CPILS is our system design for realising these learning spaces, in particular for AI methods and applications. It is characterised by a sustainable system approach and attractiveness for students and educational institutions alike by allowing for portability and ownership, international collaboration, and digital souvereignty.
In this combination, eventually digital sustainability in the sense of digital souvereignty of educators and students can be achieved for all the needs around cyber-physical settings to increase knowledge, skills and competences. From an engineering perspective, this is a trade-off rather than an absolute achievement. For example, a wider power outage will inevitably prevent international networking and collaboration. However, the CPILS design gracefully degrades and requires distributed infrastructure beyond the system itself (Internet, servers) only for parts of its functionality, and moreover is capable of voltage-controlled degradation within the system.
In the session, you will get to explore our current CPILS reference implementation with a 50W solar panel, a Raspberry Pi 400 microcomputer, and a few peripherals that are used depending on the learning domain.
Dr.-Ing. habil. Josef Spillner is a senior lecturer for computer science at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. His research activity focuses on distributed application computing paradigms. Particular emphasis is on technological support for emerging digitalisation needs of industry and society, such as smart cities, mobility and education.
Atik Santellan is a research assistant at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and a dual-degree student in Computer Science and Mathematics at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador). His work bridges distributed systems, energy-aware computing, and educational technology with a strong focus on sustainability and global accessibility.
As an Ecuadorian Indigenous student, Atik brings a grounded and ethical lens to his research. His work is guided by the belief that technology should empower the community. He is particularly invested in designing systems that are not only efficient and innovative, but also replicable in low-resource environments around the world.
Beyond his work in CPILS, Atik has contributed to projects in public procurement transparency, crisis response systems, and formal computational systems, always working at the intersection of real-world impact and rigorous technical foundations.