End of Year Cleaning

The end of the year is here, and with it a slew of publications posted:

• A Spatial Computing Approach to Distributed Algorithms, Jacob Beal and Richard Schantz, 45th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, November 2010.
  
• Adjustable Autonomy for Cross-Domain Entitlement Decisions, Jacob Beal, Jonathan Webb, and Michael Atighetchi, 3rd ACM workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec), October 2010.
• Distributed Control for Small Customer Energy Demand Management, Vinayak V. Ranade, and Jacob Beal, IEEE SASO 2010, September 2010. Vinayak's presentation is available here
• A Basis Set of Operators for Space-Time Computations, Jacob Beal, 3rd Spatial Computing Workshop, September 2010.
• Spectrum Curricula: Design and Initial Results, Jacob Beal, Alice Leung, and Robert Laddaga, Learning By Demonstration section of 2010 AAAI Robotics Exhibition, July 2010.

And, of course, a pile of recent talks as well:

• High-Level Languages for Synthetic Biology, presented at MIT Synthetic Biology Lunch seminar series, November 2010.
  
• Spatial Computing, Synthetic Biology, and Emerging IP Challenges, presented at Creative Commons, November 2010.
  
• A Spatial Computing Approach to Distributed Algorithms, presented at 45th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, November 2010.
• PACEM: The Colored Power Approach to Energy Demand Management, presented at MIT Energy Initiative Fall 2010 Conference, October 2010.
  
• A Basis Set of Operators for Space-Time Computations, presented at 3rd Spatial Computing Workshop, September 2010.
• Adjustable Autonomy for Cross-Domain Entitlement Decisions, presented at 3rd ACM workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec), October 2010.

The big news, however, is that the Functional Blueprints work I talked about in the last post has been selected for funding by DARPA, and we'll be growing robot designs next year!

Functional Blueprints at ANTS 2010

Last year, I started investigating an idea of "functional blueprints" for the Morphogenetic Engineering Workshop that Rene Doursat organized. Basically, in large biological organisms (like people), a lot of the systems seem to adapt their structure in order to maintain a consistent function. For example, our vascular system adds capillaries in order to respond to oxygen demand from consistently undersupplied cells, and as more blood flows, the stretching of the vascular network leads to growth of vessels, etc, until the whole network has appropriately adapted.

We ought to be able to apply these ideas to engineering design, so that changing one part of the system causes the rest of the system to adjust in compensation. I've taken another step forward, formalizing the idea of functional blueprints, proving the possibility of using stress as an integration signal, and validating the idea with a cartoon model of modulated tissue development, in this paper, Functional Blueprints: An Approach to Modularity in Grown Systems, and this presentation.

Massive Update

I've allowed several months of updates to accumulate while traveling, so this is going to be a rather large update.

First off, I've now given enough Spatial Computing tutorials that I think they deserve their own section, front and center. Last year's lecture series from France is up in five parts.

I've also added the biology-focussed plenary I'm giving tomorrow at the AMORPH conference in Sheffield, and the invited tutorial on collaborative applications I gave this May at the CTS conference. All the code for live demos associated with these lectures is up as well, so anyone desiring to do so can run it in the convenience of their own home.

Second, our journal article on Composable Continuous Space Programs for Robotic Swarms has been published and is up.

Finally, three more conference and workshop papers and talks:

• Laplacian-Based Consensus on Spatial Computers, with Nelson Elhage, at AAMAS 2010.
  
• Automatic Compilation from High-Level Languages to Genetic Regulatory Networks, with Ron Weiss and his postdoc Ting Lu, at the Bio-Design Automation workshop (IWBDA).
  
• Spectrum Curricula for Measuring Teachability, with Alice Leung and Bob Laddaga, at the workshop on Agents Learning Interactively from Human Teachers (ALIHT).
  

Congratulations to Master Vinayak Ranade!

Congratulations to my Master's student, Vinayak Ranade, for completing and turning in a nice thesis on Model and Control for Cooperative Energy Management, pushing forward technology for the PACEM project.

Exciting Publication Opportunities!

I'm involved with a couple of interesting events coming up, the Swarm, Amorphous, Spatial, and Complex Systems Track at 12th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS 2010), which will be a good place for any spatial-computing-related publications with a more theoretical bent, and the 2nd International Workshop on Bio Design Automation (2010), where I expect we'll be talking about our work compiling from high-level languages to DNA programs in cells.

I can haz a chemical simulator?

Now available, our journal paper, Reaction Factoring and Bipartite Update Graphs Accelerate the Gillespie Algorithm for Large-Scale Biochemical Systems, on the fabulous new stochastic chemical simulation method named... LOLCAT (thank you Sagar :-). Seriously, this method is excellent for anybody wanting to do exact simulation of complex chemical systems, as it drastically reduces the cost of simulation. Moreover, all of the code is available online at http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/46710