Project Mercury Whitepaper

Alex Pentland

To date, wireless carriers and mobile handset manufacturers have
marched in the same lockstep pattern as Intel and Microsoft.End-user
manufacturers have built what the carriers have requested, and those
that did best at that job did well in the business. That is poised to
change. Worldwide wireless, mobile computing is replacing the PC and
wired Internet as the platform of choice, and the engines of
innovation and entrepreneurial effort are becoming focused on this
industry.

At MIT we have seen a huge interest in development of new applications
and services that make use of new wireless services and the
programming capabilities of the new smart phones. One example of this
interest is that several of the recent winners of MIT's famous annual
business plan competition based their plan on wireless mobile
platforms, and are working with handset makers and carriers to turn
their vision into reality.

This is reminiscent of the situation that gave rise to the Athena
project at MIT, where IBM, DEC, Sun and others used MIT students as a
way of experimenting with new interface and networking technologies.
The first examples of Instant Messaging, the code for Direct X, and
some of the basic elements of the Web came out of that effort.What we
propose is that in a similar manner handset maker and wireless
carriers could benefit immensely from focusing the resources of MIT on
mobile computing, and encouraging development of new programming
environments, new types of applications, and new sensor/effector
capabilities for wireless mobile platforms.

This new initiative, which we call Project Mercury, built with the
cooperation of at least two equipment manufacturers and two carriers
who can operate on the MIT campus and its immediate environs. This
five-year plan would engage students, faculty and researchers in the
creation of new opportunities for mobile voice, data and media. It
will operate both as an experimental facility and as an operational
component in the teaching and research.It would develop new interfaces
and protocols for communication, and test them through deployed
applications both within MIT and and surrounding community.

Concretely Project Mercury would have a small core team of research
scientists and faculty to coordinate the effort and perform technology
transfer while reserving the majority of funding for building and
testing new vertical applications, with special emphasis on creating
cross-project development tools and standards, and including results
from end-user study projects.Participants would include not only the
immediate MIT community, but also the local urban residents and the
local entreprenurial community.It would engage Sloan School of
Management, the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab, the
Media Lab, and directly works with both existing and new programs.

A typical Project Mercury research project would be $250k/yr, annually
renewable.Projects would start with proposals from students and
individual faculty, and be selected by the lead MIT faculty in
consultation with personnel from sponsor research, business, and
venture divisions.The total program cost would be up to $8M/yr for 5
years.

The focus and deliverables for Project Mercury would be:

• A testbed for understand how IP telephony and new types of
  data services can be integrated into a stable business ecology
• New application-building tools and interface standards that
  promote disciplined, scalable 3d party applications and services.
• An initial understanding of how the new business models
  benefit the different players in the industry
• New application ideas, seeds for new enterprises, and initial
  user evaluation of those ideas within the Project Mercury testbed.
• New ideas and technologies for integrating sensors and output
  devices onto wireless mobile platforms.
• Technologies to address security concerns and evaluation of
  those ideas in the Project Mercury testbed.
• A deeper understanding of how wireless mobile computing is
  used, and what the potential is for increasing organizational
  productivity and increasing personal enjoyment.