Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Fall Semester, 2002

MIT 6.805/6.806/STS085: Topic areas

The bulk of your work in 6.805 this semester will be on a project team that will produce a significant paper for the end of the semester. The team project will be the major factor in course grades. We'll also be asking each group to prepare an in-class presentation, and turn in several progress reports and drafts over the rest of the semester.

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

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

Topic areas

As we said in class on October 9, there are four topic areas, and we'd like to have a team in each area:
  1. Trusted computing platforms (TCPA and Palladium)
  2. Digital watermarking
  3. Digital TV and the broadcast flag
  4. Digital rights languages

Here are a couple of references in each area, to help you make a choice. There will be lots more in-depth material that we'll help each team identify.

Trusted computing platforms

The basic material here will be the presentations by Joe Pato and Brian LaMacchia in class on October 18, and the readings assigned for class:

Here are a couple more pieces, to get you started:

Digital watermarking

Here's some basic orientation:

Digital TV and the broadcast flag

You'll need to work with Barb Fox to dig out the real information, but here's a start:

Digital rights languages

This is a very broad area, and you'll have to work with us to narrow the topic. But here's some stuff to give you the flavor of the issues: