| 68 Bailey Street
Dorchester, MA 02124 +1(617) 436-8341 |
beingmeta, inc
68 Bailey Street Boston, MA 02124 +1(617) 512-6867 |
| What Excites Me | I want to repair the “artificial stupidities” of modern software while enabling human communitities to think together better by giving them computationally active media and services where rich machine-usable representations are integral to the processes of production, search, organization, and transmission. |
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| Some Things I've Done | Artifical intelligence, database and knowledge base technology, natural language processing, machine learning and discovery, knowledge representation, information retrieval, programming language design and development, intelligent multimedia databases, expert system development, environments for children's game design. |
| Some Career Highlights | Completed MIT PhD at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in computational models of scientific creativity, supervised by Marvin Minsky and advised by Patrick Winston and Thomas Kuhn. |
| Associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory, executing and supervising research in knowledge representation, intelligent information retrieval, and natural language understanding, advanced multimedia databases, augmented news systems, and visualization of very large scale conversations. | |
| Founder & President of beingmeta, inc., developing products and capabilities for advanced content and knowledge management. | |
| Founder, manager, and guru for a variety of advanced R&D activities around Europe, particularly in Germany, Brussels, Finland, and Ireland. |
| Doctor of Philosophy (1990) “Exploration and Invention in Discovery” Dissertation Director: Marvin L. Minsky |
Massachussetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science |
| Master of Science in Computer Science (1986) “TYPICAL: An Implemented Approach to Type Specification and Inference” |
Massachussetts Institute of Technology Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science |
| Bachelor of Science in Philosophy (1984) “ARLO: Another Representation Language Offer” |
Massachussetts Institute of Technology Department of Linguistics and Philosophy |
| August 2001 to Present | Founder & President | beingmeta, inc |
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| Founded beingmeta to commercialize research work begun at MIT and market it to media enterprises and other sectors. Involved in business planning and operations, marketing and fund-raising, and product development. | ||
| March 2006 to March 2009 | Consulting Software Architect | Clear Methods, inc |
| Consulted on design, implementation, and integration issues for an XML-based programming language (Water) and prototyping and delivery environment (Steam XML). Contributions included updating development practices and practical enterprise integration of their existing infrastructure. | ||
| February 1998 to February 2005 | Professor | University of Tampere |
| Working in the Department of Journalism & Mass Communication, I helped design and advise on research programs in media technology as well as helping to shape undergraduate and graduate activities toward new technologies and philosophies of communication. | ||
| October 2003 to September 2004 | Senior Research Scientist | Media Lab Europe (Dublin) |
| Led and executed research in common sense reasoning, especially focused on using analogy to provide robust adaptability to knowledge systems. | ||
| November 2002 to October 2003 | Acting Director | Media Lab Europe (Dublin) |
| Served as acting director of a joint research venture between MIT and the Irish government. In addition to overall operational and fundraising responsibility (assisted by a strong team), I was responsible for scientific direction and vision as well as instituting structures for research evaluation and critique. | ||
| January 2001 | Visiting Professor | University of California, Irvine |
| Visting professor jointly hosted by UC Irvine's School of Arts and School of Engineering, working on creative synergies between the two programs. | ||
| September 1998 to August 2001 | Visiting Associate Professor | MIT Media Laboratory |
| Visiting Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, exploring issues in large-scale knowledge bases, intelligent multi-media systems, and computer understanding of unrestricted natural language text. | ||
| December 1997 to June 1999 | Consultant | StarLab (Brussels) |
| Consulted on the establishment of a new multi-disciplinary laboratory --- the StarLab --- chartered as a long-term research laboratory by the European Commission. During most of 1997 and 1998, I was based in Brussels, assisting in the creation of the StarLab, while continuing a consulting relationship with the MIT Media Laboratory. | ||
| October 1997 to August 1998 | Consultant | MIT Media Laboratory |
| Consulted on European initiatives and research in Machine Understanding, continuing work described below. | ||
| June 1997 to October 1997 | Acting Scientific Director | Klaus Tschira Foundation (Stiftung) |
| Founder and initial scientific director of the "European Media Laboratory" for the Klaus Tschira Foundation in Heidelberg, Germany. Work involved establishing structures and mission for the laboratory, making affiliations with local universities, and meeting with prospective industrial sponsors. | ||
| June 1991 to June 1997 | Project Leader | News In the Future Program |
| Project leader for News In the Future program, responsible for managing $500,000-$700,000 of research (out of approximately $2,000,000) for a consortium of publishers and technology companies interested in future news and information systems. Responsibilities included fundraising, sponsor presentations and workshops, managing graduate student research, and numerous other tasks. | ||
| January 1990 to June 1997 | Professor | MIT Media Laboratory |
| Professor of Media Arts and Sciences exploring issues in large-scale knowledge bases, intelligent multi-media systems, and computer understanding of unrestricted natural language text. Teaching included courses in Artificial Intelligence programming, the content-based description and manipulation of media, and storytelling in new media. Co-architect of prototype undergraduate curriculum in Media Arts and Sciences. | ||
| Spring 1986 to January 1990 | Consultant | Norton Corporation |
| Consulted for Norton Corporation (a multinational manufacturing support company based in Worcester, Massachusetts) on developing an expert system providing product engineering advice about Norton's product line. | ||
| August 1988 to January 1990 | Consultant | Bank of Boston |
| Consulted on the development of advisory systems for anticipating fluctuations and significant events in a trading market. Implemented system was taught as a `case' by the Harvard Business School. | ||
| January and Autumn 1987 | Visiting Lecturer | Vrije Universiteit Brussel |
| Visiting Lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (the Dutch-speaking Free University in Brussels, Belgium), teaching courses in knowledge representation and Artificial Intelligence. | ||
| 1982 to 1984 | Researcher | Atari, Inc. |
| Worked for Alan Kay and Cynthia Solomon at ATARI's research labs in Sunnyvale, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Developed systems and languages for describing computer animation and synchronizing music (using symbolic descriptions of musical events) to computer generated animation. Also developed a gestural user interface to operating systems and AI languages (called the `information waldo'), environments for teaching object oriented programming (in the experimental language QLOGO), and applied the knowledge representation language ARLO to representing encyclopedia level knowledge. | ||
| Spring 1983 | Co-Organizer | Cambridge Computer Animation Workshop |
| While at ATARI, I conceived and organized, together with Ann Marion, the Cambridge Computer Animation Workshop, bringing together traditional animators, workers in computer animation, and Artificial Intelligence researchers in a discussion of what the future of animated movie-making --- in the home and in the studio --- might look like. | ||
Much of my career has involved the development of complex innovative software systems for both research and production environments. Except where noted, I was the chief architect of the systems and was in most cases the chief or sole developer. One of the more significant accomplishments, the FramerD infrastructure, is the basis for many of these applications and is describe in more detail towards the end of this section.
I have built numerous web applications on the FramerD platform, including:
The Chopper is a natural language tagging and analysis engine originally implemented in my work at the MIT Media Laboratory. It provides for high throughput tagging based on optimizing finite state machines (OFSMs). In a nutshell, a hand-coded grammar and hybrid manual/statistical lexicon specify a set of potential paths through any given sentence. The OFSM algorithm simply finds the shortest path(s) in order to analyze the sentence.
This approach also allows the integration of other kinds of ambiguity into the parsing process by adding more paths to the graph of possibilities. For example, choices about compound aggregation (whether "fruit flies" refers to the single lexicon entry "fruit fly" or the two entries "fruit" and "fly") can simply be embedded in the graph. This can also cover simple lexical variation (capitalized words) and some simple misspellings.
The first implementation of the Chopper was in Common Lisp. A subsequent high-performance implementation was done in C, using tables written by the Common Lisp implementation (where the grammar and lexicon were specified). Eventually, the Common Lisp implementation was moved to the FramerD Scheme-based scripting language.
One version of the Chopper can be used experimentally via a web service and various online forms at services.beingmeta.com.
BRICO is a broad coverage knowledge base derived from a variety of online sources. The core of BRICO algorithmically combined the public WordNet database with various public translation dictionaries to create an interlingual knowledge base which was then audited by native speakers.
The BRICO knowledge base was subsequently extended by a variety of other public information sources, including national and international gazeteers, public web directories, and Wikipedias in various languages.
This knowledge base has been a key component in many applications and some products. The BRICOBASE (www.bricobase.net) web site provides a rich (AJAX based) browsing experience for the BRICO knowledge base, including versions optimized for Apple's iPhone and Amazon's Kindle.
While working for Clear Methods, I worked extensively on their large Java code base which implemented their SteamXML implementation of the Water language. Among my accomplishments were:
FramerD (www.framerd.org) is an innovative software infrastructure originally developed to support very large scale experience-based common sense reasoning and subsequently becoming the foundation of beingmeta's technology stack. It was implemented to support large scale and high performance computing as well as taking advantage of trends in hardware development (large caches, multiple CPUs/cores). FramerD's core implementation is in portable C and alternative implementions have been implemented in Java, Common Lisp, and Python. The FramerD implementation "layer cake" includes innovations at data, database, inference, scripting, and web application levels.
Other interesting accomplishments highlight some more of my skills and interests:
Microniver provided a low-level library for continuation-based or parallel processing (implemented in Z-80 assembler).
Cauldrons implemented part of Minsky's "Society of Mind" theory through a multi-context assertion-based reasoner that provided the assertional equivalent of "procedure calls" and inferential "memoizing."
An animation system providing non-programmer tools for specifying graphical animations; included the coordination of animated characters with musical (MIDI) event streams.
The Dungeon Kit provided an environment for creating online interactive games with responsive characters and visual and audio effects. It was implemented in QLOGO, an object-oriented version of the Logo language.
Various representation language languages starting with ARLO (my Bachelor's thesis in philosophy), that provided flexible inference and storage frameworks for a range of applications.
The information waldo provided a direct manipulation environment for computer data and knowledge bases using a physical device thatx I designed to translate intuitive hand gestures into mouse events.
TYPICAL (my M.S. thesis program) was a type inference system embedded in Scheme which was used to represent mathematical concepts.
CYRANO (my Ph.D. thesis program) was a mathematical discovery program inspired by Lenat's AM and Eurisko programs (their vision, accomplishments, and shortcomings) but based partially on Ray Solomonoff's algorithmic complexity theory (which was in turn based on the work Gregory Chaitin and others (and eventually, Claude Shannon).
The abrasives advisor was an expert system for the custom engineering of abrasive products, codifying the expert knowledge of a key sales engineer at a large manufacturing firm. This was implemented in Common LISP for DOS-based PCs.
The Fed Funds advisor was a tool for traders at a major bank's Money Market desk, using simple calendar-based heuristics to suggest possible factors influencing market fluctuations. This system was the basis of a Harvard Business School case study (it reportedly paid back many times its development costs). This was implemented in TI Scheme for DOS-based PCs.
Reimplementations of classic AI programs (planners, parsers, story understanders, etc) written for various AI programming classes taught at the MIT Media Lab for non-engineers. All written in Common Lisp.
An analogical window system which combined a novel prototype-based object system (Framer) with analogical algorithms to automatically create visual renderings of new data based on past renderings of similar information. This work was joint with the Visual Language Workshop at MIT and linked with the BadWindows environment. Written in C.
A poetry “understander” which implemented a model of aesthetic comprehension which treated poems as analogy teaching machines whose formal structure (rhyme, meter, layout) cued semantic analogies. Written in C and the FramerD scripting language.
Semantic Clay was originally conceived as an art piece at UC Irvine. It was a web-based Java applet which used the BRICO knowledge base and allowed viewers to explore a space of words and meanings by exposing related terms (including across languages) as individual terms were selected or emphasized by user interaction.