Main Research

The main theme of my current research work brings together two of my interests:

- Exploring the intersection between social dynamics, networking, and artificial intelligence.

- Investigating personal, close vicinity communications, and giving people tools to interact digitally with other people and devices around them in a way that is intuitive and natural.

• Comm.unity Platform

  Comm.unity is a new platform implementing a wireless, device-to-device information system that bypasses the need for any centralized servers, coordination, or administration. A key feature of this platform is the fact that it combines knowledge, awareness and learning of the user's social relationships and integrates this information into the communication protocols and network services. Comm.unity is designed to make it work on as many devices as possible, and with as many different radios as possible (WiFi, Bluetooth, IR, etc.). It is designed as a platform over which many different networked applications could be developed with ease. SnapN'Share and additional applications in development are intended to be used in upcoming field studies to collect information about user behavior and their social interactions, and aid in fine tuning the platform's learning capabilities.
   

  • Features
    • Distributed, Self-Organizing Architecture - No central control necessary
    • Device-to-Device Communications
      - Does not depend on existing infrastructure: Would work in basements or at the north pole
      - Potentially Free: No service fees necessary
    • Social Awareness and Learning
      - Uses mobile devices as sensors
      - Uses AI and "Reality Mining" Techniques
      - Integrates with network protocols and services.
    • Privacy Oriented - Private data and logs remain in user's domain.
    • "Social Dashboard" Interface - Socially-oriented interface or interacting with peers and the system's AI.
    • Device and O/S Independent - Aiming for "Anything wireless that runs Python"
    • Delay-Tolerance - Incomplete transfers resume when content is available again.
    • In Development (Partial List)
      - Secure communications
      - Integrate with existing network infrastructure
      - Symbian S60 and additional ports.
       
  • Modules / Component Stack:

• Social Dashboard Interface samples (press to enlarge):
  Peers are arrange according to "social distance" and trust parameters. The interface aims to provide an intuitive way for the users to interact with their peers as well as with the system's AI.
  
     
   
• Project Website

   

• SnapN'Share
  SnapN'Share, is the first sample application that makes use of the Comm.unity platform. SnapN'share runs on wireless mobile devices as well as stationary computers, and enables users to generate and seamlessly share content with different groups and communities that they belong to, as they come within close proximity of their peers.

    

  • SnapN'Share Features:
    • Local Filtering
      - Access to locally relevant information
      - Local proximity as bootstrap to new peers
    • Group & Context Based Exchange
      - "Virtual Spaces" for different social groups (friends, family, classmates, etc.)
      - Easy creation of ad-hoc or time-limited groups (e.g. meeting attendees)
      - Public groups for content exchange with strangers (news, blogs, music, etc.)
    • Trust and Identity
      - Differentiate strangers and familiar peers (e.g. spam prevention)
      - Varying degrees of trust and privacy
      - Allow different identities
    • Content survivability
      - Data spreads over trusted devices like wildfire (redundancy, freedom of press)
       
  • Knight Foundation:
    Project was first runner up in the Knight Foundation's $5M news challenge (Among winners were institutes such as MIT and MTV). The project is now part of MIT's new Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM)
     
  • CCNC'08:
    Nadav Aharony, Andrew Lippman and David P. Reed, Demonstrating SnapN'Share: Content Sharing Over a Socially Informed, Hyper-Local, Face-to-Face Networking Platform. Fifth Annual IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC'2008), Las Vegas, USA, January 2008 (to appear).
    Also to be presented in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), January 2008.
    • Accepted 2 pager: (PDF)
    • Demonstration Poster: (PDF)

• Project Website

 

• Comm.connect:
  Ideas and applications that are largely based on the Comm.unity platform for developing as well as developed countries. The following 3.5 minute video was part of a seminar focused on Costa-Rica, and illustrates the potential of the platform.
   

(With Jamie Zigelbaum (Media Lab), Ajit Dansingani (Sloan School of Mgmt), and Chantrelle Nielsen (Sloan).

 

• When Worlds Collide: Impression, Identity, and Trust Management on The Border Between Online and Real‐World Interactions
  Investigating signaling, identity and security aspects related to the burgeoning trend of mobile and location based social applications.
  • In progress.

• Medley (Evolved into Comm.unity and SnapN'Share)
  As part of the Medley project, or the general idea of personal, close vicinity communications we look at different aspects of data sharing between members of a community where there is better connectivity among group members than to a core network at large. In return for centralized access, we diffuse the information among the population, sharing memory and localizing traffic. We face research questions of how information is distributed, what conflicts there are between memory, energy, and communication costs, how one integrates local storage, and how we can use social parameters (e.g. friendships) to determine routing. Additional research interests relate to the human interface aspect - what parts of the platform do we want to expose to the user and/or give him control over, and what parts do we want to make transparent.

  Aspects I am currently working on:
   

  • Medley project demo and presentation at the Media Lab's October 2006 Sponsor Week (PDF)
    (joint work with Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos)
     
  • Opportunistic, delay tolerant, file transfer application utilizing network-coding
    Creating a scalable mobile-wireless-ad-hoc-bla-bla-bla-yadda-yadda-yadda file sharing application that utilizes opportunistic reception and network coding. (More details to come)
     
  • Mobile device implementation
    Implementing Medely-based data exchange applications on Nokia N800 platform. (More details to come)
     
  • Civil journalism application
    Decentralized, ad-hoc platform for content creation and dissemination - Where the information is really free. (More details to come)

Other Research

• Artificial Intelligence

  • Cognitive Architectures / Anigrafs:

    • Attempting to define a way to arrange "anigrafs" in hierarchical layers, analogously to neural networks, in the hope of making the huge body of work on neural networks applicable to anigrafs as well.

    • (Work in progress)

     

  • Final project for Marvin Minksky's "The Society of Mind" class:
    "The Society of Network"

    • Proposed and laid out the foundation for applying a metaphor of human social interactions to network devices, and developing a network device that is based on the Emotion Machine architecture. These devices would be able to create models of themselves, their environment, and their user, as well as make use of the different layers of Minsky's model-6 or the EM1 architecture.

    • Term paper (PDF)

     

• Sensor Technologies

  • People-Counting Using Radio Signals.

    • First place in the International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN)  "Extreme Sensing Competition".

    • This work is in collaboration with Michael Siegel, and currently in the process of being patented by the MIT Media Lab.

    • Competition homepage.

    • Competition video:

Past Projects

• Reinforcement Learning for Association Control in Wireless Networks