MIT Thesis Defense: Hyperglue, An infrastructure for Human-Centered Computing in Distributed Intelligent Environments

Speaker: Stephen Peters , MIT CSAIL
Date: Wednesday, February 1 2006
Contact: Stephen Peters, 617-253-8338, slp@csail.mit.edu

As intelligent environments (IEs) move from simple kiosks and meeting rooms into the everyday offices, kitchens, and living spaces we use, the need for these spaces to communicate not only with users, but also with each other, will become increasingly important. Users will want to be able to shift their work environment between localities easily, and will also need to communicate with others as they move about. These IEs will thus require knowledge representations which can keep track of people and their relationships to the world; and communication mechanisms that can mediate interactions.

This thesis seeks to define and explore one way of creating this infrastructure, by creating societies of agents that can act on behalf of real-world entities such as users, physical spaces, or informal groups of people. Just as users interact with each other and with objects in their physical location, the agent societies interact with each other along communication channels organized along these same relationships. By organizing the infrastructure through analogies to the real world, we hope to achieve a simpler conceptual model for the users, as well as a communication hierarchy which can be realized efficiently.