Housecleaning and Reboot

My dear neglected readers (who mostly don't exist), it's high time for some housecleaning. My poor webpage had gone entirely without updates for the better part of a year, and that has now been remedied: there are more than a dozen new publications since I last posted on this poor blog, plus various new talks, changes in projects, etc. I've also gone through, updated the text, and reorganized things a bit, reflecting changes like the fact that I now mostly work on spatial computing and engineered self-organization and don't do much human-level AI work any more.

It's also time to change this embarassingly dry and sporadic blog to something a bit more meaningful. Now, this has been a bit of a stumbling block for me, since I'm posting under my real name and in my professional capacity. On the one hand, dear reader, I hope you'll understand that, cathartic though it might be, I feel it would be a poor idea to bare my every angst, fury, and imposter-syndrome moment to every colleague, competitor, and funding agency. On the other hand, I need to speak with my own voice here, or else this is just a piece of soulless drabble torn from my fingers out of a vague sense of duty to the God of Social Media. And that's no fun for me or anybody else.

So here's the plan: I'm going to make this an exercise in the positive. You, dear reader, should know that you're getting the real me, straight and unfiltered (else why would I write such godforsakenly circuitious sentences like in the last paragraph), but circumscribed. I've got enough good and interesting things going on in my research life that I'm going to focus on those and leave the tragedy and angst implicit. For those familiar with the scientific world, please take those details as read: for every paper accepted and every proposal funded, invisible siblings have failed to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and so too with anything else I discuss.

Last note, before I vanish for now: I plan to stick to a set schedule as well, posting once a week. To make sure that I actually do this, I'm not going to post this until there's a queue of posts to come at least two months long. In the interests of full transparency, please feel free to compare the date of this post with the "last updated" mark on my web page and that will tell you how long that took.

And now, in the interests of health, wealth, and SCIENCE, I am cranking up the VNV Nation in my headphones and forging ahead in this godforsaken airport. See you next week...

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

Fall papers

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

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.