Minerva

Minerva has two halves - the universal desktop & integrated communications.

Universal "Desktop"

  • Pieces (like UFS) may be natively accessible from client platforms, but all must be browser-accessible for portability
  • take the best parts of Athena and make them cross-platform, OS-neutral services
  • find a customer
  • build alliances with others who may develop the apps, while we do the backend
  • See YouOS (http://youOs.com) for an interesting example

Universal File System

  • Needs to be seamlessly accessible across all client platforms (linux, windows, mac) as a native shared drive
  • Needs to be accessible via browser for portability
  • browser may offer richer functionality than "native mode" (i.e. versioning, metadata, RDF-based search, etc)</li></ul><li>relevant technologies in this area:
  • Al Fresco
  • Amazon storage services (used by YouOS)
  • Open AFS
  • possible applications
    • ally w/CSAIL, where we do the infrastructure & they do the app, they have an intrerest in RDF/semantic web

Universal Printing

  • thru browser:
  • Find  a printer based on name, location, properties (i.e. color, hi-speed, etc)
  • print a file from the Universal File System
  • what about native platforms? it's been hard so far to get shared protocols
  • relevant technologies:
    • TBD

Universal Computing

  • accessible via browser
  • grab a computing resource from the "cloud" and run the app of your choice
  • specify a profile/image
  • run app from Universal File System
  • how do they do UI w/a user
  • vaguely related technologies:
    • amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service
    • HPC
    • SIPB
  • Possible applications:
  • departments using web.mit.edu w/o scripting ability (i.e. Chem E)

Integrated Communications

  • portable, accessible thru browser
  • email (like Google Mail)
  • Jabber-based presence
  • IM (integrating w/all major clients, like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google)
  • chat
  • zephyr-style passive chat
  • VOIP (receive & initiate calls)
  • pieces detachable from web window (a la Gmail)
  • relevant technologies:
  • google mail
  • Zimbra
  • MIT departments are not big IM/chat users, but students are different
    • To do:
    • understand the student users
    • find a customer
    • make it visible
  • No labels