Michael H. Coen
Postdoctoral Associate
mhcoen @ csail.mit.edu

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
32 Vassar Street, 32-G478
(617) 258-7621
Cambridge, MA 02139  
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Ph.D., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 2006.

Received MIT's George M. Sprowls Award for best doctoral thesis in computer science.

 

Dissertation: Multimodal Dynamics: Self-Supervised Learning in Perceptual and Motor Systems

Advisors: Prof. Whitman Richards (Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) and Dr. Howard Shrobe (EECS)

Committee Members: Prof. Rodney Brooks, Dr. James Glass, Prof. Eric Grimson

 

My S.M. and S.B. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are also from MIT. 
I went to the wonderful Stuyvesant High School in NYC.

 

Areas of special interest:

Self-supervised machine learning.  Biologically-inspired computation.  Unsupervised segmentation of fMRI data.  Data prediction and clustering. 

Research Statement
Full CV available upon request.


Selected Publications:

  1. Michael Coen et al.  Unsupervised Segmentation of the Fusiform Face Area.  In preparation.  2007.

  2. Michael Coen.  A statistical basis for concept formation.  In preparation.  2007.

  3. Michael Coen.  Learning to sing like a bird: An architecture for self-supervised sensorimotor learning.  To appear in Proceedings of the Twenty Second National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'07). Vancouver, British Columbia.  2007.  (PDF) (Slides)

  4. Michael Coen.  Multimodal Dynamics: Self-Supervised Learning in Perceptual and Motor Systems.  Ph.D. Dissertation.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  2006.  (PDF)

  5. Michael Coen.  Self-Supervised Acquisition of Vowels in American English.  In Proceedings of the Twenty First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'06). Boston, MA. 2006.  (PDF)

  6. Michael Coen.  Cross-Modal Clustering.  In Proceedings of the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'05), pp. 932-937.  Pittsburgh, PA. 2005.  (PDF)

  7. Michael Coen.  Multimodal Integration – A Biological View. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'01), pp. 1417-1424.  Seattle, WA, 2001. (PDF)

  8. Michael Coen.    Issues in Intersensory Perception for Interactive Systems.  In Proceedings of the Workshop on Developmental Embodied Cognition (DECO-2001) at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.  Edinburg, Scotland.  2001

  9. Michael Coen.    Non-Deterministic Social Laws. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'2000), pp. 15-21.  Austin, Texas.  2000.  (PDF)

             (Note: I worked on Wall Street from January 2000 through May 2004.  I returned to MIT in January 2005.)

  1. Michael Coen, Brenton Phillips, Nimrod Warshawsky, Luke Weisman, Stephen Peters, and Peter Finin. Meeting the Computational Needs of Intelligent Environments: The Metaglue System. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Managing Interactions in Smart Environments (MANSE'99), pp. 201-212.  Dublin, Ireland. 1999. (PDF)

  2. Michael Coen, Luke Weisman, Kavita Thomas, Marion Groh, and Krzysztof Gajos.  A Context Sensitive Natural Language Modality for an Intelligent Room.  In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Managing Interactions in Smart Environments (MANSE'99), pp. 201-212.  Dublin, Ireland. 1999.  (PDF)

  3. Michael Coen and Kevin Wilson Learning Spatial Event Models from Multiple-Camera Perspectives. Invited Paper.  In Proceedings of The 25th Annual Conference of the IEEE (IECON’99).  San Jose, CA.  1999.

  4. Michael Coen.  The Future of Human-Computer Interaction, or How I learned to stop worrying and love my Intelligent Room. IEEE Intelligent Systems, pp. 8-10. March/April 1999. (PDF)

  5. Michael Coen.  Design Principles for Intelligent Environments. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'98), pp. 547-554.  Madison, WI, 1998. (PDF)

  6. Michael Coen (Ed.).  Proceedings of the 1998 AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Environments. American Association for Artificial Intelligence TR-SS-98- 02. 1998.

  7. Nancy Green, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, David Kortenkamp, Alan Schultz, Michael H. Coen, Dragomir R. Radev, Eduard H. Hovy, Peter Haddawy, Steve Hanks, Eugene C. Freuder, Charlie Ortiz, and Sandip Sen: The AAAI Spring Symposia. AI Magazine 20(3): 83-86 (1999)

  8. Michael Coen: A Prototype Intelligent Environment. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings, Integrating Information, Organization, and Architecture.  Darmstadt, Germany, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1370, pp. 41-52.  Springer 1998.

  9. Michael Coen.  Building Brains for Rooms: Designing Distributed Software Agents. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI'97), pp. 971-977.  Providence, RI. 1997. (PDF)

  10. Henry Kautz, Bart Selman, Michael Coen, Steven Ketchpel, and Chris Ramming.  An Experiment in the Design of Software Agents.  Readings in Agents.  Michael Huhns and Muindar Singh (Eds).  Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA. 1997. (Amazon link)

  11. Michael Coen.  Towards Interactive Environments: The Intelligent Room.  In Proceedings of the 1997 Conference on Human Computer Interaction (HCI'97).  Bristol, U.K. 1997.

  12. Michael Coen.  SodaBot: A Software Agent Environment and Construction System. MIT AI Lab Technical Report 1493. 1994.

  13. Henry Kautz, Bart Selman, Michael Coen, and Steven Ketchpel. An Experiment in the Design of Software Agents. In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), pp. 438-443.  Seattle, WA, 1994.

  14. Henry A. Kautz, Bart Selman, Michael H. Coen: Bottom-Up Design of Software Agents. Communications of the ACM,  37(7): 143-146 (1994)

 

 Selected Ancient Media Coverage:

  1. Documentary on the Intelligent Room.  CNN.  Multiple airings, January 2002.

  2. A History of the Future.  PBS.  Multiple airings, Summer 2001.

  3. 2001: A Space Prophecy.  CNN Headline News.  December 27, 2001.  

  4. 2001 then and now.  USA Today.  December 29, 2000.

  5. Phoning the Future.  The NewsHour with Jim Leher.  PBS.  August 30, 1999.

  6. NBC Nightly News.  November 1, 1999.

  7. Future Perfect.  Washington Post, October 10, 1999.

  8. Ubiquitous Computing.  Boston Globe, May 6, 1999.

  9. The walls have eyes - and ears and ... Boston Globe, July 20, 1998.

  10. Room with a clue.  Sunday Mail (Australia), April 19, 1998

  11. Spot the Computer.  The Guardian.  March 12, 1988.

  12. New York Times Sunday Magazine. September 28, 1997