Jacob Beal
|
Scientist
BBN Technologies
10 Moulton Street
Cambridge, MA, USA 02138
I am also a Research Affiliate of MIT CSAIL.
|
E-mail: jakebeal@bbn.com
Phone: (617) 873-7676
CV (last updated 2/25/2009)
|
This page last updated on June 22nd, 2009. If you want to
automatically receive updates regarding my work, subscribe to my blog. This page is
mirrored at MIT and
BBN
Important Links
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.
My main research interests are
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, and building human-like intelligence via collaborative
communication Recently, I have come to realize that both these
pursuits are part of a larger theme, which I am currently calling
"engineered emergence." 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 Genesis Group.
I don't plan to post my non-professional life on this web page.
Spatial Computing
(Publications/Talks)
|
Human-Level Intelligence
(Publications/Talks)
|
Engineered Emergence |
Miscellaneous |
Professional Activities |
Students
Research Publications & Talks
Publications and talks most likely to be of interest are marked with a
. This is a fairly complete list,
including some early and obsolete work.
Spatial Computing/Amorphous Computing
Publications
-
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.
-
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.
Introduction to Spatial
Computing, tutorial presented at Second International Conference on
Robot Communication and Coordination, April 2009.
Where the talk breaks to work with the simulator, the code
in this collection was
evaluated live, one invocation of Proto at a time.
-
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.
Spatial Approaches to
Pervasive Computing, with Marco Mamei and Christian Borcea,
presented at IEEE SASO 2008, October 2008.
The Proto-specific portions of the talk begin on page 110, and
where the talk breaks to work with the simulator,
this code file
was evaluated live, one invocation of Proto at a time.
-
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.
Human-Level Intelligence
Publications
-
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
-
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.
Engineered Emergence
I'm not certain that "emergence" is the right word here, as different
communities use it to mean several different things. At present,
however, it is the best word I have for talking about controlling many
unruly parts to produce a predictable behavior of the whole.
Publications
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 emergence. 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.
Miscellaneous Work
This is where interesting things that aren't in the main stream of my
research go. Some of it may be dead ends or re-inventions of the
wheel.
Publications
-
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
-
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 Activities
- Program committee
of Self-organizing
Complex Systems track for ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2010.
- Program committee of Self-Organized Systems track
for 11th International
Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed
Systems (SSS 2009).
-
Poster Chair for IEEE International Conference on
Self-adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems.
- Guest Editor,
Special
Issue on Spatial Computing, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and
Adaptive Systems.
- Guest Editor,
Special
Issue on Human-Level Intelligence, IEEE Intelligent Systems,
scheduled for publication July 2009.
- Organizer, Naturally-Inspired
Artificial Intelligence symposium, in AAAI 2008 Fall Symposium
Series, November 2008.
- Organizer, Spatial
Computing Workshop, attached to IEEE International Conference
on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, October 2008.
- Organizer,
Seminar
on Dangerous Ideas, MIT CSAIL seminar series, Fall 2001 to
Spring 2004.
- Organizer, Genesis Group internal workshop, Fall 2003.
In addition, I have recently reviewed for the journals "Autonomous
Agents and Multi-Agent Systems", "Artificial Life" and "IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part B" and the
Cognitive Science Conference.
Students
Now that I've graduated a student, I'm going to start listing
supervised theses here:
Rants & Ramblings
These are written informally, impolitely, and imprecisely. 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.