He was a graduate student in the EECS department and also was a student at Switzerland (Project MAC).
The value of many software patents to society is debatable. However, my day jobs use them in a defensive manner in the meanwhile.
The SchMUSE is an attempt to create a MUSE (Multi User Simulation Environment) using Scheme, and to fix some of the traditional problems with MUSEs. One thing is particular that we noticed is that the scripting languages in most MUSEs were not well designed and lacked a lot of the functionality of a real programming language. So for this system we gave the users access to the full power of Scheme for their scripts.
MIT has been generating data on digital media in significant quantities since the 1960's. The rate at which new bits are produced is steadily increasing, and the knowledge needed to decipher the old bits is vanishing. All of our older media are beginning to deteriorate, and valuable data is being lost every day. The Time Capsule File System (TCFS) project was developed to address the problem of preserving this information, for use now and in the future.
Specifically, TCFS is intended to be a single universal format to which we can migrate all our old files, thus simplifying the problem of dealing with a myriad specialized formats. TCFS is also designed to be simple enough to re-engineer without any previous understanding of it, which reduces the risk that data will become ``stranded''.
Using TCFS, Dr. Alan Bawden and I developed a framework using TCFS to preserve our archives in a durable and easy to use fashion. Pandora Berman and I showed this framework to be viable by using it to rescue data from backup tapes written on the Incompatible Timeshare System (ITS). To this end, I developed specialized tools to translate the data from these tapes into the more general TCFS format. Simultaneously, I developed other tools to categorize, index, and search the large set of TCFS archives that were created.
This mini-project takes all this public data and manipulates it so that you can produce nifty graphs showing the ratings of various courses over the years.