Fry's Media Lab Home Page

Christopher Fry
Research Scientist, MIT Media Lab
20 Ames St, E15-358
Cambridge, MA 02139
617 324-3630
cfry@media.mit.edu

My first name is Christopher, but please call me 'Fry".
(It is less ambiguous, more concise, and rhymes with more words.)

Mission: Make the world a more livable place.
Strategy: Create innovative technologies and processes to use them.
Techniques:

Software Agents

I work in the Software Agents Group under the direction of Henry Lieberman. As we add more functionality to our machines, the job of mapping that functionality to the goals of a user becomes an increasing burden. We can bring to bear on this problem:

Goal Driven User Interfaces
Natural Language Understanding
Common Sense Reasoning
Artificial Language Design

I'm particularly interesting in making programming easier. By facilitating the teaching of computers to perform tasks, we can multiply our toolset at low cost and become more productive.

Android Apps

You can download these apps on you Android Phone by browsing this page in a web browser on an Android phone and clicking on the below links. Tested only in Android 2.2.
Speech input to get Comment Sense from ConceptNet. Download Common Sense App.
App Launcher via speech and ConceptNet. Download App Launcher App .
Write_app is a verysimplistic natural language programing environment with just a few commands that include defining a function, setting variables and sending email. It is an HTML/javascript file that can be run from browsers including phone browsers, though not tested on most browsers. Click here to launch it.

CyberBullying

One focus of the Software Agents Group is dissipating the danger of on-line attacks. I've written a simple Android app to edit sentences via speech and analyze them using the software of Karthik Dinakar at MIT. You can install this on an Android phone by using the Opera Web browser (free on Android Market) and tapping here.

Decision Support

One characterization of humans is that we are primarily decision makers. Unfortunately, we'e often poor ones, especially in group situations. This disability permeates our society, causing war, environmental damage and a host of other unnecesary calamities.
I've written a language for capturing deliberations about decisions and a "development environment" for creating discussions in that language. It is called Justify.

Here's an overview.
Here's a more academic paper.
Here's a 3 minute demo video

Transportation

Travel broadens our horizons in many dimensions. Alas, conventional motored transport is unnecessarily slow, expensive, accident-prone, unhealthy, environment degrading and war inducing. Personal Rapid Transit is a transportation infrastructure that facilitates travel while minimizing the problems caused by cars, buses, trains and airplane flights of several hundred miles. SkyTran is the best of the proposed P.R.T. systems. MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence sponsors competitions for solutions to the problems caused by climate change. For the 2011 competition, I submitted a proposal to tile the land area of the United States that houses the 50% of people living in the densest regions, with a PRT grid that can be financed by rider fares alone, at per-passenger-mile costs far lower than cars or any US public transit system. This proposal won the Judge's Choice award for the USA and was part of a briefing to the United Nations and US Congress in January, 2012.