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.

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.