To increase the likelihood of signing on customers, Kana needed to ease the migration of external data into the Kana Response system. Kana used the WPI project as an opportunity to become involved with XML research and development. Mass. Project sponsor Microbar Inc., located in Sunnyvale, Calif., provides photolithography and copper plating chemical delivery as well as waste collection and tracking technologies. To help companies that fabricate computer chips or integrated circuits move into the future, Microbar developed a chemical management and delivery system for fabrication facilities. The system dispenses chemicals from bottles to the wafers of silicon from which integrated circuits are made.
Some chemicals used are highly susceptible to corruption due to changes in environmental conditions.
To remedy this, Microbar developed an embedded system, known as the Chemlogger, to measure environmental conditions. The Chemlogger is a data logger, designed by the WPI project team to monitor and store such environmental conditional changes as temperature and tilt of the container. To determine whether the chemical was corrupted during transport, the Chemlogger required a wireless method of communicating with the host chemical delivery system. It was designed to be autonomous, requiring no operator intervention once initialized. The students decided to use collaborative filtering, which uses similarities and dissimilarities among users to determine relevant information.