UniPlug : a framework for ad-hoc invention sharing over a campus network

Abstract

In the future, there will be a large number of devices, and most of us will own more than one (some of us already do). Many individual innovators write programs that exploit features on such devices for interesting, non-standard uses. Usually such inventions are lost over time. In this thesis, we propose a framework called UniPlug that encourages rapid and ad-hoc sharing of such inventions. It works by providing distributed repositories to make inventions publicly available, and providing an easy to use client that locates and fetches inventions for devices that a user owns. We begin by introducing the problem and related work. We then formulate the problem technically and design a solution. This is followed by the description of the implementation of a proof of concept. Further, we discuss its applicability to disseminating inventions for medical devices along with an example scenario. We conclude by summarizing this work, and briefly describing our planned future work.