Tetherless World
Research Constellation
Rensselaer’s Tetherless World Constellation took shape in 2007, with James Hendler named the Senior Constellation Professor in January. In October, Deborah L. McGuinness joined Rensselaer as an endowed Constellation Chair.
Their research groups envision an increasingly Web-accessible world in which interactive information and communication is not “tethered” to one location or device such as a personal computer. To move toward this vision, they seek to understand the Web, help engineer its future, and ensure its social benefits.
Hendler, for example, is a co-principal investigator in the End-to-End Information Accountability project, which takes a new approach to privacy and security concerns. The project is funded by the federal IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity). The MIT-Rensselaer-Yale collaboration is administered by MIT.
The Web contains a growing breadth of information, and increasingly sophisticated data mining and other techniques create a number of concerns. At present, efforts to protect national security and enforce compliance with privacy laws are based on preventing or controlling access to information. The approach of the proposed new system is to provide transparency and system-wide accountability to information usage rules and policies. The dual goals are to inspire enough confidence to allow information sharing without unnecessary restrictions while making it clear to the intelligence community and the general public that inappropriate uses of sensitive information will be detected.
Hendler is known as one of the inventors of the “Semantic Web,” a next-generation Web, in which virtual agents act as trusted aides that take over many tedious tasks for humans, such as making trip reservations. This is not possible in the current version of the Web, because it is made up of sites designed to communicate with humans, not other computers. Building the accountability system will require Semantic Web information modeling techniques so that systems can monitor data access at sites across the Web.
Hendler also is involved in the International Technology Alliance led by IBM. The alliance is a consortium of 24 institutions from industry and academia in both the United Kingdom and the U.S. In “Complexity Management of Data Infrastructure,” an alliance project funded by the Army Research Office, Boleslaw Szymanski, professor of information technology, is principal investigator (PI) and Hendler is a co-PI.
McGuinness, an expert in artificial intelligence and Web languages, is one of the creators of OWL (Web Ontology Language). OWL is included in the specifications being developed by the World Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization of the Web.
Hendler is the research lead and McGuinness is a co-PI on a project to develop the Generalized Integrated Learning Architecture (GILA). Lockheed Martin has the contract for this effort, which is funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) GILA will help U.S. Air Force planners leverage the skills of expert operators to better control air space over a battlefield. Advanced machine learning and planning research from top university teammates will be integrated into Web-based tools for military planners.
McGuinness has funding from DARPA to continue her research in the “Cognitive Agent That Learns and Observes (CALO)” project, which has the goal of creating intelligent personalized assistants that will learn about preferences and procedures by observing their partner humans, but will also accept guidance.
Other current projects in the Tetherless World Constellation include “Inference Web: A Knowledge Provenance Infrastructure,” a method of verifying the trustworthiness of information received over the Web by determining its source, and “Using Knowledge to Filter Text-Based Data,” a method of sifting through the vast flood of data coming from the Web to determine what information is new and what is a repetition of something that has already been obtained.
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