Jake Beal's Next Step

End of Year Cleaning

2010-12-21T01:23:00.002-05:00

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

2010-09-10T08:30:00.003-04:00

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

2010-08-18T16:35:00.004-04:00

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!

2010-05-25T10:34:00.002-04:00

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!

2010-03-17T08:56:00.002-04:00

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?

2010-01-07T13:51:00.005-05:00

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

Fall papers

2009-12-18T11:32:00.003-05:00

I've posted two papers from the fall, Dynamically Defined Processes for Spatial Computers and LTML - A Language for Representing Semantic Web Service Workflow Procedures.

More to come as things progress with journals...

Four papers posted

2009-08-14T11:30:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-22T17:35:00.002-04:00

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

2009-04-01T05:57:00.002-04:00

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...

2008-11-11T08:16:00.004-05:00

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

2008-10-25T16:53:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-21T15:45:00.001-04:00

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

Milestones

2008-09-17T15:04:00.001-04:00

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

2008-08-16T09:56:00.003-04:00

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

2008-07-26T14:15:00.002-04:00

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!

2008-06-26T07:59:00.001-04:00

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

Talks, talks, talks

2008-06-03T18:07:00.003-04:00

I went to post the Autonomy in Spatial Computing talk I gave at HotAC yesterday and discovered that I'd forgotten to posted the talk on Spatial Computing and the Challenge of Engineered Emergence that I gave at Harvard back in April.

Also, flying for a single-day trip is a bizarre experience. First, it's totally weird to be getting on a plane with nothing but a laptop bag for luggage. Second, the self-service checkin automatically checked me in for my flight back too, meaning that when I got to the airport on the way back, all I had to do was walk straight through security to my gate.

Focus & Autonomy

2008-05-30T10:22:00.003-04:00

Two more short papers up: one on Shared Focus of Attention for Heterogeneous Agents that I presented as a poster at AAMAS two weeks ago, and one on Autonomy in Spatial Computing for the Hot Topics in Autonomic Computing workshop next week. A couple more are in the pipeline and will be posted after I present them...

A blast from the past...

2008-04-13T12:33:00.002-04:00

I just discovered a *very* old paper online... The Development of a Small Autonomous Helicopter Robot for Search and Rescue in Hostile Environments, a paper from way, way, back in my Junior year of undergrad, when I was a team member of the MIT Aerial Robotics team, trying to get a small (6' rotor span) helicopter to fly on its own. Man, that really takes me back. It's such a happy and positive paper and we never quite got the damned thing to work, because everybody who really understood Kalman filters got recruited into more serious research projects leaving folks like me to tweak the filters and pray. In the end, though, what killed us at the competition was the heat of mid-summer Eastern Washington. The temperature was around 90, and much higher than that a few inched above the blacktop of the competition area, and the nylon gears driving the tail rotor softened and let go, dropping our helicopter from 20 feet up during warm-up trials; fortunately it was still under control of our (amazing) human RC pilot, who brought it in for a controlled crash and our electronics housings protected everything important. Ah well, that's nearly a decade ago now.

A best paper and a position paper.

2008-03-25T10:40:00.002-04:00

Our paper on Fast Self-Healing Gradients won Best Paper (Artificial Intelligence & Agents Theme) at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. This feels really good because it's a big conference (nearly 400 papers all told) and we were one of six selected for awards. The accompanying talk was very well received. I also felt proud of our Self-Organizing Pervasive Distributed Systems track, because every one of us gave a live demo as part of the talk!

I've also posted a position paper on Cognitive Security for Personal Devices, which I wrote with Rachel Greenstadt, a postdoc at Harvard. We're exploring together some ideas about "trusted computing" machines that own themselves, and how broad-spectrum passive biometrics could allow such a machine to imprint on its owner and make security decisions in a way that is more intuitive to humans.

Synthetic Biology talk

2008-02-05T20:13:00.000-05:00

I've posted a talk on programming cell aggregates that I gave to the MIT synthetic biology lunch. This talk gives a brief overview of the Proto approach to spatial computing, then details the set of engineering challenges that must be considered if we are to program organisms at the level of colonies and tissues, rather than individual cells.

Also, I've cleaned up the navigation on my page.

Fast Self-Healing Gradients

2007-10-31T12:42:00.000-04:00

We took the Constraint and Restoring Force memo, restructured it took take our language out of the story, explained the problem it solves more clearly, and gathered some more conclusive experimental data. The result is a paper, Fast Self-Healing Gradients, to appear at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing in March.

Constraint and Restoring Force memo

2007-08-28T11:29:00.000-04:00

I've posted a memo on Constraint and Restoring Force, a framework for self-healing systems that we're using in amorphous computing. Primarily developed for calculating gradients (a gradient in this sense is a field of distance estimates to a source region) this technique can also be used for other calculations like cumulative probability fields.

I've also updated my CV for the first time in two years and fixed a lot of little bugs and stale bits on the page.

Thesis!

2007-08-22T17:04:00.000-04:00

My thesis is complete, turned in, receipt obtained, and now it's up on my web page as well. Weighing in at a slim 218 pages (144 when front matter and appendices are excluded), this document officially concludes my passage through graduate school.

Now, on to post-doc and beyond!

Successful Defense

2007-08-09T11:31:00.000-04:00

My defense went well yesterday. There were a *lot* of people there---significantly more than the room could hold, including 11 professors besides my committee. The talk was good, and held the attention of the audience, though there is definitely more polishing to be done: I don't yet have enough exposition of the meaty technical core of the work. Still, that is about looking forward to job talks.

The slides are up on my web page.

Countdown to Defense...

2007-07-30T22:51:00.001-04:00

I'm in countdown to my thesis defense right now (it's coming up on August 8th), yet the rest of life hasn't stopped rolling along. I've been to two conferences in the last month, and their associated publications and talks are now up on my web page.

On the Spatial Computing/Amorphous Computing side, there was the first edition of IEEE SASO, where we presented a short paper on continuous time semantics in a 15 minute talk.

On the AI side, I have now posted the talk on Developmental Cost that goes along with the paper I posted back in May.

Amorphous Computing Reviews

2007-06-11T12:05:00.000-04:00

I'm posting a draft article reviewing Amorphous Computing written by me, Hal, and Gerry, and an informal talk I gave to the Friday bull session a couple months back. These were both really fun chances to look back over where things started and how far along they've come, though the review article was fairly stressful given my looming thesis.

Also, I decided that the "Engineered Emergence" section of my web-page ought to be below the sections that have been there longer and have more formal stuff.

Thesis fragment appearing at AAAI

2007-05-15T10:14:00.000-04:00

One of the things I've had to wrestle with in my work is how to explore architectural ideas freely while still keeping things connected to human intelligence. I finally managed to write down a clear explanation of my approach for my thesis, and that fragment is going to be appearing this summer at a AAAI workshop on "Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence."

Here it is: Developmental Cost for Models of Intelligence

Slides, and a new section

2007-04-30T11:44:00.000-04:00

In March, I gave an invited talk at a workshop on Unconventional Computation, in which for the first time I drew together the scattered threads of my research into a single theme: "engineered emergence." I'm not really happy with the name, since the word "emergence" carries a lot of flakiness baggage. For the moment, though, it's the best way I know to describe engineering a bunch of unruly parts so their interactions will produce coherent behavior of the whole.

The slides from the talk are here, and I've reorganized my page to give engineered emergence its own section, pulling in the Assassin's Guild talks which push me towards thinking this way.

Tech Report: "Building Spatial Computers"

2007-03-15T12:13:00.000-04:00

Lots of stuff in flight, waiting to see whether it gets accepted or not. Also, I'm deep in the thesis-writing process.
Anyway, we've memoized an amorphous computing paper that got rejected, since it might be a while before its next turn around the wheel of submission:

Building Spatial Computers, Jonathan Bachrach and Jacob Beal, MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2007-017, March 2007.

This was a submission to HotOS, talking about the operating system level problems of building Proto and making the amorphous medium abstraction actually work. Half the reviewers thought we'd already published the paper---no! This is the one where we actually talk about implementation, rather than sweeping it under the rug to focus on why somebody should care about our abstraction. A third complained that we didn't focus on the programming abstraction. The fourth had good, helpful feedback that will actually help us on the next turn of the wheel.

It seems to me like there's a fundamental problem in trying to present a non-incremental change in a computer science paper. If you try to present it all in five to ten pages, you can't give enough details to satisfy anybody. If you slice off a bite-sized chunk to talk about, then either you've already published on the idea or the reviewers complain that they wanted the other parts. I don't know whether other fields are like this too, or if this is just to be expected when you're working on problems that don't come with a pre-existing focussed sub-community dedicated to their study.

If I were a better writer, I might know how to present things to get the readers to reliably take that leap in five pages. For now, I'll keep struggling and getting frustrated every time I get a review that says something like "But why aren't you programming in C?"

New material posted on my website

2006-10-03T09:28:00.000-04:00

A bunch of amorphous computing work:

An extended abstract and poster that Jonathan Bachrach and I took to DCOSS 2006 in June.
A presentation on manifold programming semantics, presented at the Space-Oriented Computing seminar at Dagstuhl.
A brief overview of the amorphous medium approach, presented to new grad students at the CSAIL Open House.

Also, I've put up the abstract and slides that I gave at this year's CSAIL Student Workshop, "Sidestepping Impossibility: Combat Consensus in the Assassins' Guild," a fun piece extending my previous Assassins' Guild analysis.

Why a blog?

2006-10-02T20:37:00.000-04:00

Why am I starting a blog? A few days ago, a friend mentioned that he thought I should put one together so that I could periodically announce papers and other creative output that friends and colleagues might be interested in. I agree, and thus a blog.

If you're here, you probably know me. Welcome. I recommend subscribing to this blog as a news-feed and expecting infrequent updates, on the order of once a month.