Coverity

Program analysis tools for finding security bugs in large software programs provide an exciting new opportunity. Security bugs in legacy systems exploited by malicious attacks can have a large impact on a company's productivity. It is nearly impossible to go through existing software programs manually to discover security bugs due to the scale and complexity of the problem. Program analysis tools that can identify some of these bugs automatically and have reasonably low number of false positives provide a viable alternative. The demand for this product is already here in the market. Research on this topic has shown promising results. The group that can commercialize this technology into a product will have a huge impact in the market. Below are two related links:

Mentor Technologies

Mentor Technologies provides decision analysis software that automates the decision making process and formulates value-added recommendations to users. Mentor Technologies is targeting five markets to deploy the Mentor Module: Day trading, gaming (poker), military, online fantasy sports (football) and sports coaching.

P2P Personal data managment

We will identify and evangelize a market-driven technology for personal data backup. Individual consumers, who comprise our target customer base, are generating ever-increasing volumes of personal data.

Based on our initial analysis of the market space and available technologies for personal data backup, we propose a peer-to-peer (P2P) persistent data storage solution. Forrester predicts that personal data management will be the "killer app" for P2P. By caching data on servers distributed throughout the network, P2P provides consistent, durable data storage that is accessible anywhere.

Traditional P2P solutions cache data promiscuously on any server in the network. To avoid consumer privacy concerns, we propose harnessing social networks to allow individuals to designate trusted servers based on who their "friends" are. Implementation might involve an extension of existing social networks such as Friendster or instant-messaging buddy lists.

Pandorabots

Pandorabots is a software robot (also known as a bot) hosting service. From any browser, you may create and publish your own robots to anyone via the web. We believe that our technology yields the fastest bots available on the Internet. The bots are based on AIML and spring entirely from the work of Dr. Richard Wallace and the A.L.I.C.E. and AIML free software community based at http://www.alicebot.org.

Pandorabots' mission is to introduce the concept of these virtual personalities to potential users, and give them the tools they need to create successful and profitable commercial ventures. We believe that Pandorabots can be used as virtual website tour guides and hosts, customer service reps, consumer messaging, interactive cartoon characters, etc.

PicoRadio

We are exploring a business model for a self-configurable wireless sensor network, i.e. a network whose nodes can sense various attributes such as temperature or movement. This type of network consists of hundreds or thousands of limited computing-power nodes. Over the past three years, this concept has emerged as various research projects have been conducted in universities, such as Pico Radio, "smart dust" and motes. Compared to even an inexpensive PC, one node in any of these systems has negligible computing power. However, if hundreds or thousands of them are combined and enabled to communicate with each other directly, this creates a network whose power comes from its breadth and density.

This type of network comprises tiny individual nodes that can:
  • operate wirelessly
  • collect basic information
  • detect newly-added nodes and add them to the network
  • function properly if some nodes are missing from the system
  • consume very little power
  • be built very cheaply

xThink

http://www.xthink.com/index.html (see below). This is a pioneer start up company for developing products that use sketch recognition technology. The Gartner group predicts that about 35% of all laptops in 2007 will be a Tablet PC, but the growth this year has already surpassed expectations.

There is an existing (unique and patented) recognition technology that is already in beta testing in one product. This is an opportunity to propose a business model (including decisons on target markets, sales channels, marketing strategy etc) in a practical setting, as the startup company is deciding its business approach for the technology that was developed.

Last updated October 29, 2003
(c) 2003
Niraj Shah, Kurt Keutzer
Course projects
:: Coverity
:: Mentor Technologies
:: P2P data backup
:: Pandorabots
:: PicoRadio
:: Xthink

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