6.805/6.805/STS085 Team projects

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Fall Semester, 2002

MIT 6.805/6.806/STS085: Team projects and final papers

The major factor in your grade in 6.805 will be your work on a team project leading to a final paper. We'll also be asking each group to prepare an in-class presentation, and to turn in progress reports and drafts. Each team will be assigned one of the class instructors as an advisor, but don't hesitate to contact any of us for help.

The final paper should be a substantial piece of work. We're expecting papers around 50 or 60 pages long, but we're more interested in quality than in length. For a model paper, see the report done for this class in fall 98:

Digital Identity in Cyberspace, by Paul Covell, Steve Gordon, Alex Hochberger, James Kovacs, Raffi Krikorian, Melanie Schneck, HTML version, MS Word version

Although the paper should be a coherent whole, it should be divided into sections, and the individual author of each section identified. You should identify one team member to be editor, responsible for the overall uniformity and coherence of the entire piece.

Approach and Scope of Paper

We are certainly interested in your opinions and ideas. But you should treat this paper as research and analysis, not just venting or making unsubstantiated assertions. On the other hand, we do expect you to have opinions and a point of view on your topic -- not to just write a book report or a summary of what other people have said.

Your paper should have a thesis, i.e., an idea, claim, or argument that you are putting forward and defending in the paper. We expect that your paper will start out by stating the thesis in the first one or two paragraphs, and that you will proceed to support the thesis in a focused and coherent way. If you are unclear on what we mean by this, have a look at note from the RPI Writing Center, Thesis Development in Analytical Writing.

Be sure to back up your arguments with facts and by citing source material. There is a tremendous amount of reference material available on-line in the course archives and other places on the net. If you cite unpublished on-line material, you can include citations or links to the appropriate URLs in the bibliography.

Note: For an explanation of how to cite legal cases, see Introduction to Basic Legal Citation by Peter W. Martin of Cornell Law School. The easiest place to start is in the example section (chapter 3).

Teams and topics

Digital TV and the broadcast flag Advisor: Barb Fox Anna Dreyer Deb Dasgupta Roshan Baliga	Digital Rights Languages Advisor: Danny Weitzner Bukola Aina Delia Hou Tazeen Mahtab
Trusted computing platforms Advisor: Joe Pato Aram Narang Hareesh Nair Omar Bakr Tony Scelfo	Peer to Peer Advisor: Hal Abelson Michael Rasmussen Patrick Cody

Schedule

Here is the schdule for drafts and progress reports:

October 24: Each team should give an initial 10-minute oral report in class talking about how you are thinking about the paper, and what things you want to address. The main purpose of this report is to give you feedback how to narrow your topic so that you can make progress.
October 31: Each team should give a second 10-minute oral update in class: What are the main points you are working on? Where are you getting stuck? What questions do you have? What major resources are you using?
November 7: Each team should turn in a written statement of the main thesis and contribution of the paper. Also give an outline, listing the various sections of the paper and who is doing each section. Also say who the editor of the paper is.
December 2: Complete draft of the paper due. This should be a finished draft, with all sections written, and needing only some polish after we give you feedback.
December 11: Final paper due.

Each team will also have to give an extended presentation on their topic in class. We'll announce the schedule of thse by October 25.

Getting Started

Each team should arrange regular meetings with your advisor. Here are some references to get you started (we've already posted these). Work with your advisor to get more ideas, references, and suggestions for other people to talk with.

Trusted computing platforms

Ross Anderson's TCPA/Palladium FAQ.
The TCPA Home Page
I Told You So: Cringely's Pulpit from June 27, 2002.
Palladium and the TCPA, from Bruce Schneier's Counterpane newsletter of August 15, 2002.

Digital TV and the broadcast flag

Lauren Wiley, BPDG Proposes "Broadcast Flag" to Protect DTV Broadcasts
Cory Doctorow, Understanding the Broadcast Flag
Motion Picture Association of America, Broadcast Flag Frequently Asked Questions
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consensus at Lawyerpoint

Digital rights languages

Robert McGarvey, "Digital Rights Management," Technology Review, January/February 2001 (not on line).
XrML.org and XrML FAQ
Barb Fox, Fair Use Friendly DRM? (PDF), Draft from Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference, April 2002
Dan Burk and Julie Cohen, Fair Use Infrastructure for Copyright Management Systems (PDF), Draft from Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference, April 2002
Renato Iannella, Digital Rights Management (DRM) Architectures
Richard Stallman, The Right to Read.
W3C DRM Workshop Report
The indecs project on rights metadata
Creative Commons
Open Digital Rights Langauge specification
Extensible Media Commerce Language specification

Peer to peer

Discuss with Hal.

Turning in the paper

We'll say more about this later in the semester. For now, we'll just point out that we require good quality writing. Papers with spelling, grammatical, or stylistic errors will be penalized in grading, or may not even be accepted. Good resources on writing are The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, by Les Perelman, Ed Barrett, and Jim Paradis (available on the Web at MIT only), and Grammar and Style Notes by Jack Lynch.