Research
I am presently a Research Assistant in the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, working on my PhD. Most of my previous work involves Common Sense Computing.
My work history
- Research Assistant, Personal Robots Group, MIT Media Laboratory. September 2008-present.
- Research Assistant, Software Agents Group, MIT Media Laboratory. September 2007-September 2008.
- Research Assistant, Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory. September 2006-September 2007.
- Technical Assistant, Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory. June 2004-September 2006.
- Undergraduate Research Assistant, Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory. February 2001-June 2004.
Current projects
My current research is in scruffy planning, wherein artificially intelligent systems can learn, remember, and plan with human-like imprecision.
Past projects
My thesis work was on PerspectiveSpace. PerspectiveSpace is a method for discovering belief patterns in data of people's beliefs, agreements, and disagreements. The applications vary widely, from finding self-consistent microtheories in otherwise informal and inconsistent corpora to recommending not movies but reviews of movies to people deciding on something to watch. The paper is listed in my paper trail.
The major, overarching project my thesis work was involved with is OpenMind Common Sense (this link is to our primary common sense knowledge elicitation site, Commons), but it has many parts and derivatives. I contributed most significantly through CSAMOA (Common Sense Application Model of Architecture, the paper is below), which underlies Commons and is the framework on which ConceptNet is built.
AnalogySpace is a dimensionality reduction of our common sense knowledge that organizes concepts along compelling axes. Much of my contribution to this project is through the Divisi singular value decomposition toolkit that we developed for Python.
My paper trail
- J. B. Alonso, K. C. Arnold, and C. Havasi. Envisioning a Robust, Scalable Metacognitive Architecture Built on Dimensionality Reduction. In AAAI-10 Workshop on Metacognition for Robust Social Systems, July 2010. PDF
- J. B. Alonso. PerspectiveSpace. Master's thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. PDF
- J. B. Alonso. CSAMOA: A common sense application model of architecture. Proceedings of the Workshop on Common Sense and Interactive Applications, 2007. PDF
- L. Bonanni, J. Alonso, and H. Ishii. handchop: Tangible exploration of volumetric data by direct cut-plane projection. In CHI 2008: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems. ACM, 2008.
- C. Havasi, R. Speer, and J. Alonso. Conceptnet 3: a flexible, multilingual semantic network for common sense knowledge. In Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, 2007. NOTE: This paper won an award for best student paper on semantic processing. PDF
- H. Mitasova, L. Mitas, C. Ratti, H. Ishii, J. Alonso, and R. S. Harmon. Real-time landscape model interaction using a tangible geospatial modeling environment. In Computer Graphics and Applications, volume 26(4), pages 5563. IEEE, July-August 2006.
- J. Yoon, K. Ryokai, C. Dyner, J. Alonso, and H. Ishii. egaku: enhancing the sketching process. In SIGGRAPH 04: ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Posters, page 42, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM.
Personal
Current activities
At present, I am the Treasurer of the Educational Studies Program, a volunteer educational outreach organization at MIT that explores innovative ways to host enrichment programs for middle and high school students.
I am also involved with the Manic Sages MIT Mystery Hunt team, and I have been since 2007. For 2008, though, I also served as Treasurer.
Some of my friends
Some of the people I'd like to throw a link to include:
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