Steve's Self-Aggrandizing Home Page
2009-Dec-24
Another little theater trip this past weekend for me and gmtarkin. BTW, if you can visit Times Square after an evening show in the middle of a snowstorm, it's a pretty cool sight. It's been a while since our last [More...]
2009-Mar-04
OK, that's really odd. As regular readers know, my live journal pic has for lo these many years been a picture of an elephant taken on safari way back in 1999. Now, without my having done anything to my LJ [More...]
2009-Feb-24
For an actor whose name people don't usually know, Mark Sheppard sure has been getting a lot of work. I swear, this guy appears on every drama series I see lately. A few years ago I first noticed him as "Badger" on [More...]
2009-Feb-22
I'm having a bit of a movie weekend, apparently. Friday ML managed to score tickets to the live show of Cinematic Titanic at the Somerville Theatre. For those of you who don't know what this is, CT is one of [More...]
2004-02-21
The Last 5 Years at Speakeasy. Gorgeous music by Jason Robert Brown, but the Merrily-esque dual timelines means that the two characters have a hard time making a real connection onstage. Becca Ayers is really good as Catherine.
2003-11-08
Little Shop of Horrors revival on Broadway. A good revival of a favorite, with a fantastic orchestra. Needs some polish to work a bit better, but the plant is a gorgeous piece of work by the Jim Henson studios.
2003-11-08
Boy From Oz on Broadway. A real star tour by Hugh Jackman, who is stunning as he owns the stage for nearly the entire length of the production. Catch this soon -- there's not enough here for the show to last after Hugh leaves.
2003-11-07
Wicked on Broadway. A delight, based on the book by Gregory Maguire. Kristin Chenoweth shines as Glinda the Good Witch, but Idina Menzel's Wicked Witch is thrilling. Can't wait for the cast album.
Where I Am
I live in Cambridge, near Harvard Square. It's fantastic living in this city -- a few blocks from everything, including the best Indian restaurant and one of the best Thai restaurants in the Boston area. Plus, I can bike everywhere. Take that, Bay Area! There's nothing more exhilirating than passing cars stuck in traffic at rush hour.
What I Do
Currently I'm working at the MIT AI Lab, playing around with things in the AIRE Project, formerly known as the "Intelligent Room". We do neat things like hook up cameras, projectors, and microphones into an agent framework, allowing us to interact with an environment very much like a modern living room as if it were the computer system in front of you. Side projects include CD players that try to choose good songs, map systems that can answer questions like ``Does this country own ballistic missiles'', and an expert system that can play word games.
Supposedly I'm at MIT to get a doctorate (I already received a Master's degree roughly four billion years ago), which will most likely be extending many of the room concepts to creating a system that can assist users in tasks as unobtrusively as possible. I've got a proposal, which was actually signed by the department and everything. You probably want to ignore the timeline in there, unless you're dying for a good laugh.
In my not very copious free time, I occasionally do lots of stuff in musical theatre, usually with the MIT Musical Theatre Guild. During that time, I've directed, acted, and even created orchestrations for a parody of Star Wars. I watch lots of theatre, too -- check out the miniature theatre reviews on this page. My wife and I spend lots of time traveling the world, and I like to tinker around with home networking and Debian Linux. I also dabble in graphic design.
Publications
Here's the dry, boring stuff, for your perusal:
- Plan-Driven Ubiquitous Computing. Draft. In submission (name and institute is currently blanked out for a blind submission format).
- Using Semantic Networks for Knowledge Representation in an Intelligent Environment. PerCom'03, Ft. Worth, TX. 2003
- Infrastructure for Multi-User, Multi-Spatial Collaborative Environments. Student Oxygen Workshop, January 2001.
- Meeting the Computational Needs of Intelligent Environments: The Metaglue System (Michael Coen, Brenton Phillips, Nimrod Warshawsky, Luke Weisman, Stephen Peters, and Peter Finin) MANSE'99. Dublin, Ireland. 1999
And, if you like pretty pictures, we have a recent (June 2003) MPEG4 video demonstrating our vision of technology in a meeting environment. It shows off our group members (including me), setting up meetings, notifying people about them through phones and desktop displays, using kiosks to navigate information, moving information from one space to another, and using tablet computers to take notes and provide feedback.