Scientist BBN Technologies 10 Moulton Street Cambridge, MA, USA 02138 I am also a Research Affiliate of MIT CSAIL.

Primary E-mail: jakebeal@mit.edu Official E-mail: jakebeal@bbn.com Warning: email to my BBN address is sometimes randomly destroyed or delayed by the Evil IT Gremlins of Raytheon. Phone: (617) 873-7676 CV (last updated March 16th, 2012)

Ongoing Projects

• Proto: a spatial computing language for programming networks using a continuous space abstraction
  
• Synthetic Biology: using high-level languages, design automation, and predictive modeling to control the behavior of living cells
  
• Morphogenetically Engineered Design Variation: helping redesign robots using "functional blueprints" inspired by animal development
  
• Zome Energy Networks: applying engineered self-organization to grid-scale energy demand management

Other Important Links

• IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO) [October, 2012]
  
• 5th Spatial Computing Workshop (SCW'12) [June, 2012]
  
• 4th International Workshop on Bio Design Automation (IWBDA 2012) [June, 2012]
  
• MIT Proto implementation of our Proto spatial computing language
• Spatial Computing community website

About Me

I am a scientist at BBN Technologies, and a research affiliate of MIT CSAIL (formerly the AI lab), where I did my graduate and postdoctoral work. I am also a fellow of Science Commons.

The uniting theme of my research is "engineered self-organization"---the production of predictable aggregate behavior from locally interacting elements.  At present, my investigations of mainly in the domain of spatial computing (an extension of amorphous computing)---the description and control of systems of many devices distributed to fill a space, where the difficulty of moving information between devices is strongly dependent on the distance between them.  Previously, I have also done research on building human-like intelligence via collaborative communication.  I also dabble in a number of other things on the side that attract my interest or appear as obstacles in my path. At BBN, I am a member of the Information and Knowledge Technologies business unit. When at MIT, I work with Project MAC and the Weiss Lab.

I don't plan to post my non-professional life on this web page.

Research Publications & Talks

Tutorials and Survey Talks

I have, at this point, given a number of different tutorials and survey talks on spatial computing, of varying different lengths and focus. Typically, these talks break to demonstration in Proto partway through, using a sequence of examples. This collection of demonstration code is may be used to execute the examples.

• Recent Survey: Spatial Computing: From Manifold Geometry to Networking and Biology (PowerPoint with Animations)
  Invited talk at University of Iowa, February 2012.
• Biology Focused: Spatial Computing: From Manifold Geometry to Biology; associated demonstration file.
  Presented at AMORPH 2010.
• Lecture Series: Spatial Computing: From global to local and back again
  • Lecture 1: Spatial Computers and Fields
  • Lecture 2: Continuous Space-Time Programs
  • Lecture 3: Discrete Approximation and Self-Healing
  • Lecture 4: Moving Devices
  • Lecture 5: Current Frontiers
  Presented at Third French Complex Systems Summer School, August 2009.
• Robotics Focused: Spatial Computing for Swarms; associated demonstration file.
  Presentation locations include IEEE SASO 2009 and RoboComm 2009.
• Pervasive Computing Focused: Spatial Approaches to Pervasive Computing; associated demonstration file.
  Presented with Marco Mamei and Christian Borcea at IEEE SASO 2008; proto-specific portions begin on page 110.
• Collaborative Networks Focused: Spatial Computing for Networked Collaboration; associated demonstration file.
  Presented at CTS 2010.

Publications

• Organizing the Aggregate: Languages for Spatial Computing, Jacob Beal, Stefan Dulman, Kyle Usbeck, Mirko Viroli, Nikolaus Correll, chapter to appear in "Formal and Practical Aspects of Domain-Specific Languages: Recent Developments", ed. Marjan Mernik, scheduled for September 2012.
  Preprint available on arXiv, CoRR, abs/1202.5509v2, April 2012. 
• A Method for Fast, High-Precision Characterization of Synthetic Biology Devices, Jacob Beal, Ron Weiss, Fusun Yaman, Noah Davidsohn, and Aaron Adler, MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2012-008, April, 2012.
  
• An Agent Framework for Agent Societies, Kyle Usbeck and Jacob Beal, Actors and Agents Reloaded (AGERE) workshop at SPLASH 2011, October 2011.
  
• On the Evaluation of Space-Time Functions, Jacob Beal and Kyle Usbeck, 4th Spatial Computing Workshop (SCW'11) at IEEE SASO 2011, October 2011.
• Using Morphogenetic Models to Develop Spatial Structures, Jacob Beal, Jessica Lowell, Annan Mozeika, and Kyle Usbeck, 4th Spatial Computing Workshop (SCW'11) at IEEE SASO 2011, October 2011.
  
• Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) Version 1.0.0, Anil Wipat, Alan Villalobos, Guy-Bart Stan, Trevor Smith,
    Herbert Sauro, Nicholas Roehner, Matthew Pocock, Hector Plahar, Jean Peccoud, Chris Myers, Goksel Misirli, Curtis Madsen, Matthex Lux,
    Allan Kuchinsky, Timothy Ham, Raik Grunberg, John Gennari, Drew Endy, Omri Drory, Douglas Densmore, Deepak Chandran, Jacob Beal,
    J. Christopher Anderson, Aaron Adler, Laura Adam, Cesar Rodriguez, Mandy Wilson, and Michal Galdzicki, BioBricks Foundation Request for
    Comments (BBF RFC) #84, October 2011.
  
• Morphogenetically Assisted Design Variation, Aaron Adler, Fusun Yaman, Jeffrey Cleveland, and Jacob Beal, 2nd International Conference on Morphological Computation, September 2011.
  
• Bringing Biology and Engineering Together with Spatial Computing, Jacob Beal, extended abstract for 12th International Conference on Membrane Computing, August 2011.
  
• Automatic Compilation from High-Level Biologically-Oriented Programming Language to Genetic Regulatory Networks, Jacob Beal, Ting Lu, Ron Weiss, PLoS ONE 6(8): e22490. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022490, August 2011.
  
• Functional Blueprints: An Approach to Modularity in Grown Systems, Jacob Beal, Swarm Intelligence Journal, 5(3-4), p257-281, June 2011 (preprint, supplementary information).
  A book chapter version will appear in the book "Morphogenetic Engineering: Toward Programmable Complex Systems" in mid-2012. Prior conference version in 7th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2010), September 2010.
• High-Level Programming Languages for Bio-Molecular Systems, Jacob Beal, Andrew Phillips, Douglas Densmore, Yizhi Cai, chapter in "Design and Analysis of Bio-Molecular Circuits", edited by Heinz Koeppl, Douglas Densmore, Mario di Bernardo, Gianluca Setti, Springer, 2011 (preprint).
  
• TASBE: A Tool-Chain to Accelerate Synthetic Biological Engineering, Jacob Beal, Ron Weiss, Douglas Densmore, Aaron Adler, Jonathan Babb, Swapnil Bhatia, Noah Davidsohn, Traci Haddock, Fusun Yaman, Richard Schantz, Joseph Loyall, peer-reviewed abstract in 3rd International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, June 2011.
• Toward Automated Selection of Parts for Genetic Regulatory Networks, Fusun Yaman, Swapnil Bhatia, Aaron Adler, Douglas Densmore, Jacob Beal, Ron Weiss, and Noah Davidsohn, peer-reviewed abstract in 3rd International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, June 2011.
  
• A Software Stack for Specification and Robotic Execution of Protocols for Synthetic Biological Engineering, Viktor Vasilev, Chenkai Liu, Traci Haddock, Swapnil Bhatia, Aaron Adler, Fusun Yaman, Jacob Beal, Jonathan Babb, Ron Weiss, and Douglas Densmore, peer-reviewed abstract in 3rd International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, June 2011.
  
• Core Operational Semanics of Proto, Mirko Viroli, Jacob Beal, and Matteo Casadei, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2011, March 2011.
  
• A Spatial Computing Approach to Distributed Algorithms, Jacob Beal and Richard Schantz, 45th Asilomar Conference on
    Signals, Systems, and Computers, November 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.
  
• Composable Continuous Space Programs for Robotic Swarms, Jonathan Bachrach, Jacob Beal, and James McLurkin, Neural Computing and Applications, Special Issue on Swarms, Volume 19, Issue 6 (2010), pages 825-847.
• Laplacian-Based Consensus on Spatial Computers, Nelson Elhage and Jacob Beal, 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), May 2010.
• Reaction Factoring and Bipartite Update Graphs Accelerate the Gillespie Algorithm for Large-Scale Biochemical Systems Sagar Indurkhya and Jacob Beal, in PLoS ONE 5(1): e8125. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008125, January 2010.
  Code for the LOLCAT algorithm is available in MIT DSpace
• Dynamically Defined Processes for Spatial Computers, Jacob Beal, Spatial Computing Workshop 2009, September 2009.
• Programming Manifolds, Jacob Beal and Jonathan Bachrach, Dagstuhl Seminar 06361: Computing Media and Languages for Space-Oriented Computation, Andre DeHon, Jean-Louis Giavitto, and Frederic Gruau eds, December, 2006. Updated version published as MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2009-023, June, 2009.
• Fast Self-Stabilization for Gradients, Jacob Beal, Jonathan Bachrach, Dan Vickery, and Mark Tobenkin, IEEE DCOSS 2009, June 2009.
  An extension and discrete-network proof tightening the bounds from our previous Constraint and Restoring Force gradient paper.
• Behavior Modes for Randomized Robotic Coverage, Jacob Beal, Nikolaus Correll, Leonardo Urbina, and Jonathan Bachrach, Second International Conference on Robot Communication and Coordination, April 2009.
• Amorphous Computing, Hal Abelson, Jacob Beal, and Gerald Jay Sussman, article in "Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science" Springer-Verlag, March 2009.
  Draft available as MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2007-030, June 2007
• Flexible Self-Healing Gradients, Jacob Beal, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2009, March 2009.
• Cells Are Plausible Targets for High-Level Spatial Languages, Jacob Beal and Jonathan Bachrach, Spatial Computing Workshop, October 2008.
• Empirical Characterization of Discretization Error in Gradient-based Algorithms, Jonathan Bachrach, Jacob Beal, Joshua Horowitz, and Dany Qumsiyeh, IEEE SASO 2008, October 2008.
• PACEM: Cooperative Control for Citywide Energy Management, Jacob Beal and Hal Abelson, whitepaper, August 2008.
• Autonomy in Spatial Computing, Jonathan Bachrach and Jacob Beal, Third Workshop on Hot Topics in Autonomic Computing, June 2008.
• Fast Self-Healing Gradients, Jacob Beal, Jonathan Bachrach, Dan Vickery, and Mark Tobenkin, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2008, March 2008.
  Received Best Paper Award (Artificial Intelligence & Agents Theme); Also available as MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2007-050
• Constraint and Restoring Force, Jacob Beal, Jonathan Bachrach, and Mark Tobenkin, MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2007-044, August 2007.
• Continuous Space-Time Semantics Allow Adaptive Program Execution, Jonathan Bachrach, Jacob Beal, and Takeshi Fujiwara. IEEE SASO 2007, July 2007.
  Also available as MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2007-038
• Building Spatial Computers, Jonathan Bachrach and Jacob Beal, MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2007-017, March 2007.
• Programming a Sensor Network as an Amorphous Medium, Jonathan Bachrach and Jacob Beal, extended abstract for poster at IEEE DCOSS 2006, June 2006.
  Our poster at DCOSS.
• Infrastructure for Engineered Emergence on Sensor/Actuator Networks, Jacob Beal and Jonathan Bachrach, IEEE Intelligent Systems, (Vol. 21, No. 2) pp. 10-19, March/April 2006.
  Preprint version of the article and sidebar.
• Amorphous Medium Language, Jacob Beal, Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems Workshop at AAMAS 2005, July 2005.
• Biologically-Inspired Robust Spatial Programming, Jacob Beal and Gerald Sussman, MIT AI Memo 2005-001, January 2005.
• Programming an Amorphous Computational Medium, Jacob Beal, in Unconventional Programming Paradigms International Workshop, September 2004. Updated version in LNCS Vol. 3566, August 2005.
• RamboNodes for the Metropolitan Ad Hoc Network, Jacob Beal and Seth Gilbert, MIT AI Memo 2003-027.
  A tightened version was published in Workshop on Dependability in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks and Sensor Networks, part of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, June 2004.
• Near-Optimal Distributed Failure Circumscription, Jacob Beal, AI Memo 2003-017, August 2003.
• A Robust Amorphous Hierarchy from Persistent Nodes, Jacob Beal, AI Memo 2003-012, May 2003.
• Persistent Nodes for Reliable Memory in Geographically Local Networks, Jacob Beal, AI Memo 2003-011, April 2003.
• Leaderless Distributed Hierarchy Formation, Jacob Beal, AI Memo 2002-021, December 2002.
  This didn't work as well as I wanted, and led me to start working with Persistent Nodes for hierarchy formation instead.
• Amorphous Infrastructure for Language Implementation, Ryan Newton and Jacob Beal, MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2006-015, December 2002.
  Written as a project in an Amorphous Computing seminar, this work was the origin of the Persistent Node algorithm. We made an official recording of it in 2006 to make referencing easier.

Talks The reader is advised that most spatial computing talks also involve a live demo that is usually at least indicated in the PDF slides.

• Automated Design of Synthetic Biology Feedback Circuits, presented at 2012 Institute of Biological Engineering Conference, March 2012.
  The abstract associated with the talk.
  
• On the Evaluation of Space-Time Functions, presented at 4th Spatial Computing Workshop (SCW'11) at IEEE SASO 2011, October 2011.
• Toward Breaking the Complexity Barrier for Synthetic Biology Therapeutics, presented at IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology, August 2011.
  
• Morphogenesis as a Reference Architecture for Engineered Systems, presented at 3rd International Workshop on Morphogenetic Engineering, August 2011.
  The two-page abstract associated with the talk.
• TASBE: A Tool-Chain to Accelerate Synthetic Biological Engineering, presented at 3rd International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, June 2011.
• Core Operational Semanics of Proto, presented at ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2011, March 2011.
  
• 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.
  
• Functional Blueprints: An Approach to Modularity in Grown Systems, presented at 7th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2010), September 2010.
• Automatic Compilation from High-Level Languages to Genetic Regulatory Networks, presented at 2nd International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, June 2010.
  The two-page abstract associated with the talk. A prior version was presented at the 2010 Institute of Biological Engineering Conference.
• Laplacian-Based Consensus on Spatial Computers, presented at 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), May 2010.
• Dynamically Defined Processes for Spatial Computers, presented at Spatial Computing Workshop 2009, September, 2009.
• Functional blueprints: a means of adaptive integration?, presented at First International Workshop on Morphogenetic Engineering, June 2009.
  The one-page abstract associated with the talk.
• Behavior Modes for Randomized Robotic Coverage, presented at Second International Conference on Robot Communication and Coordination, April, 2009.
• Flexible Self-Healing Gradients, presented at ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2009, March 2009.
• Empirical Characterization of Discretization Error in Gradient-based Algorithms, presented at IEEE SASO 2008, October 2008.
• Grand Challenge: Spatial Computing, presented for IEEE SASO 2008 panel on Grand Challenges, October 2008.
• Cells Are Plausible Targets for High-Level Spatial Languages, presented at Spatial Computing Workshop, October 2008. Also presented at 2009 Institute of Biological Engineering Conference.
• Spatial Computing and the Challenge of Engineered Emergence, presented at Harvard CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar, April 2008.
  A shorter, related talk, Autonomy in Spatial Computing was presented at the Third Workshop on Hot Topics in Autonomic Computing, June 2008.
• Fast Self-Healing Gradients, presented at ACM SAC 2008, March 2008.
  Associated paper won the Best Paper Award (Artificial Intelligence & Agents Theme).
• Programming Cell Aggregates, presented to the MIT Synthetic Biology Lunch, January 2008.
• Continuous Time Programming, presented at IEEE SASO 2007, July 2007.
• A Brief History of Amorphous Computing, internal presentation, April 2007.
  An informal talk explaining how my work fits into the larger context of amorphous computing. Take the categories with a grain of salt.
• Programming Spatial Computers, internal presentation, September 2006.
  A 5-minute summary of what the Amorphous Medium approach is all about, for new students at CSAIL.
• Programming Manifolds, presented at Dagstuhl Seminar 06361, "Computing Media and Languages for Space-Oriented Computation," Germany, September 2006.
  An expansion and update on the continuous semantics of Proto.
• Continuous Semantics of Proto, internal presentation, January 2006.
• Amorphous Medium Language, presented at the Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems (LSMAS) Workshop in AAMAS-05, Netherlands, July 2005.
  Contains a good overview of AML abstraction layers, execution model, and language concepts.
• Amorphous Computing's Programming Languages, internal presentation, April 2005.
• Programming an Amorphous Medium, invited talk at Unconventional Programming Paradigms workshop, France, September 2004.
• Near-Optimal Distributed Failure Circumscription, presented at PDCS 2003, Los Angeles, November 2003.

Publications

• Spectrum Curricula: Design and Initial Results, Jacob Beal, Alice Leung, and Robert Laddaga, Learning By Demonstration section of 2010 AAAI Robotics Exhibition, July 2010.
  
• Spectrum Curricula for Measuring Teachability, Jacob Beal, Alice Leung, and Robert Laddaga, Workshop on Agents Learning Interactively from Human Teachers, at AAMAS 2010, May 2010.
• Enhancing Methodological Rigor for Computational Cognitive Science: Complexity Analysis Jacob Beal and Jennifer Roberts, Cognitive Science Conference, July 2009.
• Enhancing Methodological Rigor for Computational Cognitive Science: Core Tenets and Ad Hoc Residuals Jennifer Roberts and Jacob Beal, Cognitive Science Conference, July 2009.
• Self-Managing Associative Memory for Dynamic Acquisition of Expertise in High-Level Domains, Jacob Beal, IJCAI 2009, July 2009.
• Curricula and Metrics to Investigate Human-Like Learning Jacob Beal, Paul Robertson, and Robert Laddaga, AAAI 2009 Spring Symposium "Agents that Learn from Human Teachers", March, 2009.
• Engineered Robustness by Controlled Hallucination, Jacob Beal and Gerald Jay Sussman, AAAI 2008 Fall Symposium "Naturally-Inspired Artificial Intelligence", November 2008.
• Analyzing Composability in a Sparse Encoding Model of Memorization and Association, Jacob Beal and Thomas F. Knight, Jr, IEEE 7th International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL 2008), August 2008.
• Learning Composable Signals for a Cognitive Substrate, Jacob Beal, Cognitive Science Conference, July 2008.
• Shared Focus of Attention for Heterogeneous Agents, Jacob Beal, Short Paper, 7th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2008), May 2008.
• Learning by Learning to Communicate, Jacob Beal, PhD Thesis, August 2007.
  Also listed as Tech Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2007-042. If you have difficulty with the PDF, try it in postscript
• Developmental Cost for Models of Intelligence, Jacob Beal, AAAI 2007 Workshop on Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence, July 2007.
  Also listed as Tech Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2007-026
• CogSci to AI: It's the Brainware, Stupid!, Jacob Beal and Gerald Jay Sussman, AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Cognitive Science Principles Meet AI-Hard Problems", Stanford, March 2006.
• Leveraging Language into Learning, PhD Proposal, February 2004.
  Previously partially developed in AI Memo 2003-007
• An Algorithm for Bootstrapping Communications, Jacob Beal, International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS), June 2002.
  A longer version appears as AI Memo 2001-016, August 2001.
• Generating Communications Systems Through Shared Context, Jacob Beal, Master's Thesis, AI Tech Report 2002-002, January 2002.

Talks

• Spectrum Curricula for Measuring Teachability, presented at Workshop on Agents Learning Interactively from Human Teachers, at AAMAS 2010, May 2010. A smaller, updated version of this talk was presented at the Robotics Exhibition Workshop at AAAI 2010 in July 2010.
• Enhancing Methodological Rigor for Computational Cognitive Science: Complexity Analysis, presented at Cognitive Science Conference, July 2009.
• Self-Managing Associative Memory for Dynamic Acquisition of Expertise in High-Level Domains, presented at IJCAI 2009, July 2009.
• Curricula and Metrics to Investigate Human-Like Learning, presented at AAAI 2009 Spring Symposium "Agents that Learn from Human Teachers", March, 2009.
• Learning by Learning to Communicate, PhD Thesis Defense, MIT CSAIL, August, 2007. Material after page 43 is supplementary slides that were not used in the talk, but could be brought up to help respond to questions.
• Developmentally Inspired Cognitive Architectures, presented at AAAI 2007 Workshop on Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence, July 2007.
• CogSci to AI: It's the Brainware, Stupid!, presented at AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Cognitive Science Principles Meet AI-Hard Problems", Stanford, March 2006.
• Integration by Coincidence: Status and Speculation, presented at MIT Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) workshop, January 2006.
• Implementing Valiant's Neuro-Logic, internal presentation, December 2005.
• Leveraging Language into Learning, presented at AAAI 2005 Doctoral Consortium, Pittsburgh, July 2005.
• Generating Communication Systems Through Shared Context, RQE presentation, Spring 2004.

Publications

• Sidestepping Impossibility: Combat Consensus in the Assassins' Guild., Jacob Beal, MIT CSAIL Student Workshop 2006, September 2006.
  Followup to the first Assassins' Guild paper, this one examines carefully how combat consensus gets around an impossibility result.
• What the Assassins' Guild Taught Me About Distributed Computing, Jacob Beal, International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) 2006, June 2006. (Also MIT CSAIL Technical Report MIT-CSAIL-TR-2006-038)
  The deeper I look at how live action roleplaying runs distributed simulations, the more surprises I find. I think there's something here for computer scientists to pay attention to.

Talks

• Principles for Engineered Emergence, Jacob Beal, Unconventional Computation: Quo Vadis?, March 2007. (Published as a CSAIL Work Product).
  The first talk explicitly about engineered self-organization. A shorter but more recent version was presented at ICCS in November, 2007
• Sidestepping Impossibility: Combat Consensus in the Assassins' Guild., Jacob Beal, MIT CSAIL Student Workshop 2006, September 2006.
  See note above on the associated publication.
• What the Assassins' Guild Taught Me About Distributed Computing, Jacob Beal, International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) 2006, June 2006.
  See note above on the associated publication.

Publications

• 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.
  
• LTML - A Language for Representing Semantic Web Service Workflow Procedures, Mark Burstein, Robert P. Goldman, Drew V. McDermott, David McDonald, Jacob Beal, and John Maraist, workshop on "Semantics for the Rest of Us -- Variants of Semantic Web Languages in the Real World", at 8th International Semantic Web Conference, October 2009
• Research Challenges in Information Systems for the Next Generation Electric Grid, Richard Schantz, Jacob Beal, Joseph Loyall, Partha Pal, Kurt Rohloff, and Azer Bestavros, NITRD Workshop on New Research Directions for Future Cyber-Physical Energy Systems, June 2009.
  
• Cognitive Security for Personal Devices, Rachel Greenstadt and Jacob Beal, First ACM workshop on AISec, October 2008.
  This is a position paper on attaining more human-like security by having a device imprint on a broad-spectrum collection of passively available biometrics. A prior version was published as MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2008-016, in March 2008.
• Learning From Snapshot Examples, Jacob Beal, MIT AI Memo 2005-012, April 2005.
  The ideas in this memo need more contextualizion w.r.t. other machine learning work. As it stands, it documents an abstraction barrier and learning heuristic I needed and was unable to find elsewhere. Obsoleted by the IIES mechanism in my PhD thesis.
• Shrinking the Leap of Faith, Jacob Beal and Tim Shepard, unpublished draft, March 2005.
  This sketches some ideas about exploiting the locality of wireless connections to make it easier to establish trust with distant servers on the Internet.
• Deamplification of DoS Attacks via Puzzles, Jacob Beal and Tim Shepard, unpublished draft, October 2004.
  Tim was trying to figure out whether the puzzles in the IETF's proposed Host Identity Protocol were actually a useful defense against an attacker with a large network of hijacked computers. We found out that it is.
• Predictive Modelling for Fisheries Management in the Colombian Amazon, Jacob Beal and Sara Bennett, International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS) 2004, June 2004.
  This was an application of modelling to a real-world problem that has petered out because the project it was to support lost funding.
• The Development of a Small Autonomous Helicopter Robot for Search and Rescue in Hostile Environments, Jacob Beal, Carl Blaurock, Keith Bonawitz, Kyrilian Dyer, Paul Elliott, Paul Eremenko, Eric Feron, Emilio Frazzoli, Benjamin Ingram, Michael Lester, Manway Liu, Stefan Marti, Joshua Napoli, Kailas Narendran, and Scott Rasmussen, Proceedings of the AUVSI Annual Symposium, July, 1999.
  When I was an undergrad, I was on the MIT Aerial Robotics Team, whose purpose was to compete in an unmanned aerial vehicles contest. I recently discovered online the paper we sent one year to the conference associated with the contest. I have no idea which portions I wrote or who even went to the conference.

Talks

• Adjustable Autonomy for Cross-Domain Entitlement Decisions, presented at 3rd ACM workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec), October 2010.
  
• Learning from Snapshot Examples, presented in CSAIL Student Seminar, MIT, April 2005.
  See note above on the associated publication.
• Analyzing Failures as Noise Presented with Seth Gilbert at LIDS Student Conference 2004, MIT, January 2004.
  I don't know any technique for analyzing the failure response of a network where nodes are continually being added and removed. Seth & I kicked around ideas for a while and brought them to a student conference looking for others who might have ideas. We still haven't figured anything out.

Professional Service Activities

• Organizer, Engineered Self-Organization Seminar Series, 2008 - present at BBN Technologies.
• Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems journal, 2011 - present
  
• Organizer, Spatial Computing Workshop 2012 at AAMAS 2012. Also organized the 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008 workshops at IEEE SASO.
• Guest Editor, Special Issue on Spatial Computing, The Computer Journal, scheduled for publication in mid-2012.
• Organizer, Workshop on Complex Sciences in the Engineering of Computing Systems at 25th International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems, February 2012.
  
• Program Co-Chair, IEEE International Conference on Self-adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO) 2011, October 2011.  Previously Workshop Chair for SASO 2010 and Poster Chair for SASO 2009.
  
• Organizer, IJCAI 2011 2nd Workshop on Agents Learning Interactively from Human Teachers, July 2011. (Sequel to 1st ALIHT at AAMAS 2010)
  
• Publications Chair, 3rd International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation (IWBDA), June 2011.
• Guest Editor, Special Issue on Spatial Computing, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, published in two issues: June and September 2011.
• Track Chair, Swarm, Amorphous, Spatial, and Complex Systems Track at 12th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS 2010)
• Guest Editor, Special Issue on Human-Level Intelligence, IEEE Intelligent Systems, July 2009.
• Organizer, Naturally-Inspired Artificial Intelligence symposium, in AAAI 2008 Fall Symposium Series, November 2008.
• Organizer, Seminar on Dangerous Ideas, MIT CSAIL seminar series, Fall 2001 to Spring 2004.
• Organizer, Genesis Group internal workshop, Fall 2003.

• Model and Control for Cooperative Energy Management, Vinayak V. Ranade, M.Eng. Thesis, June 2010.
• A Distributed Building Evacuation System, Dany M. Qumsiyeh, M.Eng. Thesis, June 2008.

These are old and written informally, impolitely, and imprecisely, with the arrogance of a young grad student. Don't take them seriously unless they happen to inspire you...

• Human-Like vs. Complementary Intelligence
  I sometimes think that AI is incoherent because we mean different things when we say "intelligence". This rant tries to pry the definitions apart and figure out what human-like intelligence might mean. (October, 2004)
• How do we know when we're winning?
  Thoughts on AI research methodology presented during the Genesis Group's internal workshop in 2003.