Anil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing

Modern networked environments increasingly rely on spatial reasoning, but lack a coherent representation for coordinating physical space. Consequently, tasks such as enforcing spatial access policies remain fragile and manual. We first propose a unifying representation based on bigraphs, capturing spatial, social, and communication relationships within a single formalism, with user-facing tools to generate bigraphs from physical environments. Second, we present a hierarchical agent architecture for distributed spatial reasoning, with runtimes for agentic processes to interact the spatial representation, and a context-aware execution model that scopes reasoning to the smallest viable subspace. Together, these enable private, reliable, and low-latency spatial networking that can safely interact with agentic workflows.