Wed. April 23, 2008: Jacob Beal on Spatial Computing and the Challenge of Engineered Emergence
The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:
CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 23 April 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119
Topic: Spatial Computing and the Challenge of Engineered Emergence
Speaker: Jacob Beal, MIT
Spatial Computing and the Challenge of Engineered Emergence
As the density of computing devices in our environment increases, it
becomes reasonable to think of them in aggregate as a “spatial
computer”—a collection of devices that fill a space, where the
difficulty of moving information between devices is strongly dependent
on the distance between them. Programming a spatial computer using
conventional methods is difficult due to its scale and
decentralization, but in biology we find many examples, like flocking
birds and developing embryos, where local interactions produce robust
global behaviors. We aim to solve spatial computing problems by
establishing engineering control over such emergent behaviors,
following a two-part strategy. First, application design can be
decoupled from networking details by programming the space, rather
than the network. We have created a language, Proto, takes global
programs for a continuous space abstraction and compiles them to local
programs that cause a network of devices to approximate the specified
global behavior. Second, we are building a library of Proto programs
which capture emergent phenomena as components that can be hooked
together to produce predictable behavior. Together, these allow us to
solve many problems in sensor networks and distributed robotics using
only a few dozen lines of code.
Bio:
Jacob Beal is a postdoctoral associate in the Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where he recently completed
his Ph.D. under Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman. His research interests
center on the engineering of robust adaptive systems, with a focus on
problems of system integration for human-level intelligence and on
problems of modelling and control for spatially-distributed networks
like sensor networks, robotic swarms, and cells during morphogenesis.