Four papers posted

I've posted the Proto semantics memo, my paper on the dynamics of self-organizing maps from IJCAI, and both papers on methodology from the Cognitive Science Conference.

Spatial, spatial, spatial

I've posted a whole bunch of spatial computing stuff on my page this time. There's links to the upcoming
Spatial Computing Workshop (submission deadline July 10th,
special issue on spatial computing in ACM TAAS (submission deadline August 1st), and the spatial computing community home page.

In addition, I've posted my talk about functional blueprints from the Morphogenetic Engineering Workshop, our DCOSS paper with gradient self-stabilization proofs, and the PACEM whitepaper on how to use spatial computing for painless energy demand management in a smart power grid.

I've also reorganized the page to put key links and spatial computing up higher, and edited the text some.

March Madness

I have posted an extensive update on my page, consisting of two new upcoming service events:
* Poster Chair for IEEE International Conference on Self-adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, submission deadline April 23rd, 2009.
* Guest Editor, Special Issue on Spatial Computing, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, submission deadline August 1st, 2009.
There are also three new papers:
* Curricula and Metrics to Investigate Human-Like Learning
* Behavior Modes for Randomized Robotic Coverage
* Flexible Self-Healing Gradients
and a new spatial computing tutorial that I gave at RoboComm.
Finally, the Springer-Verlag "Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science" has finally been published, including an article on Amorphous Computing by myself, Gerry Sussman, and Hal Abelson.

A busy month...

It's been a very busy month, and I'm finally posting all the things that need posting. First off, my website now has a Professional Activities section, listing things I've organized, including the upcoming special issue on Human-Level Intelligence for IEEE Intelligent Systems (deadline January 5th!). This also lists the two events I just ran, the Naturally-Inspired AI symposium, and the Spatial Computing Workshop. Both went very well, and have budding communities that must be nurtured.

I've also posted all the papers and talks from the last month:

• Engineered Robustness by Controlled Hallucination, Jacob Beal and Gerald Jay Sussman, AAAI 2008 Fall Symposium "Naturally-Inspired Artificial Intelligence", November 2008.
  
• Cells Are Plausible Targets for High-Level Spatial Languages, Jacob Beal and Jonathan Bachrach, Spatial Computing Workshop, October 2008. (and talk)
  
• Empirical Characterization of Discretization Error in Gradient-based Algorithms, Jonathan Bachrach, Jacob Beal, Joshua Horowitz, and Dany Qumsiyeh, IEEE SASO 2008, October 2008. (and talk)
  
• Cognitive Security for Personal Devices, Rachel Greenstadt and Jacob Beal, First ACM workshop on AISec, October 2008.
  

Whew.

Proto tutorial slides posted

First of a batch of updates about to go up, getting done and promoted first due to urgency: I've now posted the slides for the Spatial Computing tutorial that we gave at this year's SASO conference, along with the accompanying live demo code.

I'm also listing them on the Proto downloads site as a stop-gap measure until I get the proper tutorial written.

MIT Proto released more than a month ago

Somehow, until today, I managed to forget to announce our release of MIT Proto. It's now posted on my web site.

Milestones

I have now started my job as a Scientist at BBN Technologies. So far, so good, and I'm glad I chose them.

ICDL 2008

I'm just back from presenting Analyzing Composability in a Sparse Encoding Model of Memorization and Association, a paper I wrote with Tom Knight on applying digital circuit design principles to debug a sparse neural coding model.

The International Conference on Development and Learning, where I presented the paper, is a fairly young but high quality conference that's filling in one of the gaps between AAAI and CogSci. I had a blast, and ICDL also has the distinction of being the conference I've attended with the *highest* percentage of people that had something to say to me, and vice versa.

My paper at CogSci

I've been at CogSci the past few days, where I have a paper on Learning Composable Signals for a Cognitive Substrate. It's an extract of the top-level experiments from my dissertation, cast in the larger framework of the cognitive substrate hypothesis, which holds that human intelligence can be explained in terms of a collection of relatively simple specialists that integrate together to form a unified mind.

Congraduations to Dany Qumsiyeh!

I've just graduated my first student: Dany Qumsiyeh turned in an excellent M.Eng. thesis yesterday called A Distributed Building Evacuation System.