Meeting the Computational Needs of Intelligent Environments: The Metaglue System

Intelligent Environments (IEs) have specific computational properties that generally distinguish them from other computational systems. They have large numbers of hardware and software components that need to be interconnected. Their infrastructures tend to be highly distributed, reflecting both the distributed nature of the real world and the IEs’ need for large amounts of computational power. They also tend to be highly dynamic and require reconfiguration and resource management on the fly as their components and inhabitants change, and as they adjust their operation to suit the learned preferences of their users. Because IEs generally have multimodal interfaces, they also usually have high degrees of parallelism for resolving multiple, simultaneous events. Finally, debugging IEs present unique challenges to their creators, not only because of their distributed parallelism, but also because of the difficulty of pinning down their “state” in a formal computational sense. This paper describes Metaglue, an extension to the Java programming language for building software agent systems for controlling Intelligent Environments that has been specifically designed to address these needs. Metaglue has been developed as part of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab’s Intelligent Room Project, which has spent the past four years designing Intelligent Environments for research in Human-Computer Interaction.