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