Yahoo! Calendar has over two million active users. In systems of this scale, very small design decisions can have enormous practical impact on the performance of the system. In this project the students have undertaken a ground-up evaluation and redesign of the file and computational structures used in Yahoo! Calendar, in hopes of improving performance, usability, flexibility, and interaction with other Yahoo! services.

Teradyne is a leading producer of large-scale testing systems (ATEs) for semiconductor chip manufacturers. This project sought to develop a distributed, web-based interface to information about Teradyne equipment worldwide. The system will allow Teradyne to monitor the performance of all of their customers' ATEs. It will promote closer collaboration between Teradyne and its clients through automatic licensing upgrades, bug tracking, and software update downloading, as well as support for real-time diagnosis and resolution of ATE problems.

QB, Inc. provides software to corporations, such as movie studios, which need to manage large databases of media content, including photographs, audio, and video clips. The goal of this project was to produce software for a hand-held device to serve as a remote client for the QB MediaStar(TM) system. This required addressing the extreme limitations of hand-held devices, such as screen size, processor speed, storage, and communications bandwidth. The system was designed to accommodate forthcoming wireless technology as well.

Nuera provides high-end communication switches that carry voice telephone traffic over Internet connections. These are increasingly being used by mid-level phone service providers to bypass traditional communication paths. Testing these systems has previously required custom testing hardware costing millions of dollars. The Clinic team developed software that instead allows Nuera to use one of its own switches as a hardware test suite, eliminating this cost.

The Clinic team developed a prototype of information kiosks to be placed in local public access points (e.g., supermarkets) to provide information about services provided by the PVCCD. Communications will be two-way, allowing, for example, users to file applications for services from these kiosks. The goal was to design a web-based system with a rugged yet easy to use interface.

N2H2 provides web-content filtering services to schools and companies around the world. Their current tools rely on a static list of web-sites identified by category, which must be updated frequently. The Clinic team researched, designed, and prototyped a system for determining on-the-fly whether a page is of a specified category or not.

Microsoft has recently introduced its ".NET" proposal for new web-browser technologies. The team was asked to produce prototype applications of the technologies to act as motivating examples to developers to get them interested in the system and act as design examples for how to use it.

Michael Cummings, a biologist at MBL, is working on the analysis of antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis bacteria. By building on the work of last year's Clinic team, this year's team developed tools to predict the level of antibiotic resistance in a bacterium given its genome. These tools are flexible enough to be of use in a multitude of other classification problems.

JPL would like to move away from the traditional practice of designing custom communications protocols for each device and mission, and towards using a layered approach called the Spacecraft Onboard InterFace (SOIF). To that end, the team was to implement TCP/IP on SpaceWire, a wiring bus being designed for spacecraft. Due to difficulties procuring the necessary hardware, however, the team instead focused on tools to test Firewire, another bus being considered for space use. These tools should be easily extensible for use with SpaceWire.

The Aerospace Corporation sponsored a series of projects focusing on issues in intrusion detection. The Intrusion Detection Working Group (IDWG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, a standards body) has been developing a common method of communicating intrusion detection events. This consists of two parts, a transport protocol and a message format. In this project, the Clinic team assisted in the development, implementation, and evaluation of two proposed transport protocols.

The team upgraded the current implementation of DirecTv's web-based TV guide system. The system should allow extensive customization based on user preferences, and be accessible both at a computer and via wireless hand-held devices. In addition, the system should include the functionality of the newest generation of DIRECTV's program guide, which is included with the most recent line of set-top units.