I am a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and an Affiliate at the Computer Science and AI Lab as well the New England Complex Systems Institute.

I do research on collective intelligence, with the goal of enabling more effective coordination in distributed systems with humans and/or computer-based agents. My current projects include:

• The Deliberatorium: We are developing methods and tools to help large groups efficiently arrive at well-founded conclusions, through on-line deliberations, concerning highly complex challenges.You can check out the system yourself: contact me to get an account.

• Designing Complex Systems: We are developing knowledge-based methods and tools that help people design more effective and reliable coordination processes for such domains as electronic markets and supply chains.

• Negotiation: We are defining novel algorithms that help agents negotiate "complex" contracts with multiple interdependent issues.

• Exception Handling: We are developing run-time services that help make open distributed systems operate more robustly by monitoring for and handling exceptions. One particular focus is 'emergent dysfunctions' that can occur in distributed systems (such as the Internet) that operate without centralized top-down control.

• Collaborative Design: We are developing tools that enable more effective collaborative design of complex physical and software artifacts.

I'm on the editorial boards for CERA, AI EDAM and CSCW journals, a reviewer for many others, and have chaired or served on the program committees for numerous workshops and conferences on AI, agents, concurrent engineering, software engineering and computer-supported cooperative work.