Bradley Rhodes

In the past ten years I've been a research scientist, inventor, software engineer, UI designer, software architect and I've even dabbled in management. Currently I'm working at Google, doing things I can't talk about (at least, not yet).

I completed my Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in June 2000, under the supervision of Pattie Maes in the Software Agents research group. My primary research area is Intelligence Augmentation: how to build software and devices that help a person perform mental tasks. In particular, my dissertation was on Just-In-Time Information Retrieval agents, which are software agents that provide you with potentially useful information based on your local context. I am also an active researcher in the budding field of wearable computing, and was one of the "cyborgs" in the MIT Wearable Computing Project. If we were Power Rangers I'd be "Purple 'Borg".

About Me

Publications: Links to my conference and journal publications. Most have links to the text, and there are also slides for a few presentations I've made.
Short Curriculum Vitae: Publications and education, with a Latin name.
Resume: My resume.
Press Quotes: The Media Lab is a high-profile place, and the press has been quite interested in wearable computing in recent years. I like to think I finally know how to communicate with the press effectively, but sometimes... well I'll let the quotes speak for themselves. I think I'm glad the media has moved on from techno-utopia; it makes it easier to get work done.
Generals Exam Proposal and Reading Lists: I completed my general exams in September of 1998 in the areas of Intelligence Augmentation (main area), Personalized Information Management (technical area) and Theories of Interface Design and Cognition (context area). The proposals, reading lists and 24-hour exam essays are all available.
Personal Pages: Photos, hobbies, family, favorite music... all the things you'd expect from the personal section.
Blog: My blog, covering intelligence, media technologies, intellectual property, and the occasional politics.

Software For Download

The Remembrance Agent: The Remembrance Agent (aka Remem) is software that watches what you type or read in the Emacs text-editor and continuously suggests related documents from old email archives, notes files or other text files that might be useful. It runs under Unix for Emacs-20 and XEmacs.
The Autonomous Creature Toolkit: The action selection work I did for my Master's thesis is heavily influenced by Pattie Maes' Agent Network Architecture. An implementation of that algorithm, written by Bob Ramstad, can be found here.

In Layman's Terms: notes about various technologies

[These will eventually be linked to white papers and brief descriptions, but right now they aren't.]

Just-In-Time Information Retrieval agents: My Ph.D. thesis was on Just-In-Time Information Retrieval ("JITIR") agents, which are systems that automatically suggest information that may be useful based on a person's local environment. The Remembrance Agent was the first such system that I developed.
Wearable Computing: There are many approaches to wearable computing, from fashion accessory to hands-free access to information. My approach is that wearables are an excellent platform for implementing software agents, and also that wearables need software agents to realize their full potential.
Context-aware computing: A context aware application is a piece of software that has access not only to the commands a user enters but also to what is happening in the user's environment.

Last modified: Fri Sep 30 16:38:11 PDT 2011