In dealing with long-term tracking databases withwide-area coverage, an important problem is in formulating anintuitive and fast query system for analysis. In such a querysystem, a user who is not a computer vision research ...

The ability to control emergent phenomena depends on decomposingthem into aspects susceptible to independent engineering. Forspatial self-managing systems, the amorphous-medium abstraction lets youseparate the system s ...

Current modularization techniques fail when applied to hard AI problems.But cognitive science shows that the mind has modules specialized for particular functions.Unlike current engineered modules, the modules of themind ...

Programming reliable behavior on a large mesh network composed of unreliable parts is difficult. Amorphous Medium Language addresses this problem by abstracting robustness and networking issues away from the programmer via ...

Amorphous computing considers the problem of controllingmillions of spatially distributed unreliable devices which communicateonly with nearby neighbors. To program such a system, we need a highleveldescription language ...

Distributed computing and live-action roleplaying share many of thesame fundamental problems, as live-action roleplaying games commonly include simulations carried out by their players.Games run by the MIT Assassin's Guild ...

The Subtext project seeks to make programming fundamentally easier by altering the nature of programming languages and tools. This paper defines an operational semantics for an essential subset of the Subtext language. It ...

In Quantum Mechanics the transition from a deterministic descriptionto a probabilistic one is done using a simple rule termed the Bornrule. This rule states that the probability of an outcome ($a$)given a state ($\Psi$) ...

Executing untrusted code while preserving security requires that thecode be prevented from modifying memory or executing instructionsexcept as explicitly allowed. Software-based fault isolation (SFI) or"sandboxing" enforces ...

In this thesis, I describe a quantitative model that accounts for the circuits and computations of the feedforward path of the ventral stream of visual cortex. This model is consistent with a general theory of visual ...

Microfluidic devices are emerging as an attractive technology for automatically orchestrating the reactions needed in a biological computer. Thousands of microfluidic primitives have already been integrated on a single ...

This report is a supplement to our paper "Distributed Quota Enforcement forSpam Control" (NSDI 2006). We assume here that the reader has readthe main paper. In this report, we first analyze the enforcer nodes'key-value ...

Robotic and embedded systems have become increasingly pervasive in applicationsranging from space probes and life support systems to robot assistants. In order to act robustly in the physical world, robotic systems must ...

Autonomous vehicles need to be able to plan trajectories to a specified goal that avoid obstacles, and are robust to the inherent uncertainty in the problem. This uncertainty arises due to uncertain state estimation, ...

Agile autonomous systems are emerging, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), that must robustly perform tightly coordinated time-critical missions; for example, military surveillance or search-and-rescue scenarios. In ...

We propose a framework for detecting and tracking multiple interacting objects from a single, static, uncalibrated camera. The number of objects is variable and unknown, and object-class-specific models are not available. ...

How much damage can a malicious tiny device cause in a single-hopwireless network? Imagine two players, Alice and Bob, who want toexchange information. Collin, a malicious adversary, wants to preventthem from communicating. ...

IP prefixes undermine three goals of Internet routing: accurate reflection of network-layer reachability, secure routing messages, and effective traffic control. This paper presents Atomic IP (AIP), a simple change to ...

I devised and implemented a method for constructing regular andsemiregular geometric objects in n-dimensional Euclidean space.Given a finite reflection group (a Coxeter group) G, there is a standard way to give G a group ...

In the Probabilistic I/O Automata (PIOA) framework, nondeterministicchoices are resolved using perfect-information schedulers,which are similar to history-dependent policies for Markov decision processes(MDPs). These ...