■ We describe an approach to intelligent user interfaces, based on the idea of making the computer a collaborator, and an application-independent technology for implementing such interfaces. What properties of a user interface would make you want to call it intelligent? For us, any interface that is called intelligent should at least be able to answer the six types of questions from users shown in figure 1. Being able to ask and answer these kinds of questions implies a flexible and adaptable division of labor between the human and the computer in the interaction process. Unlike most current interfaces, an intelligent user interface should be able to

Complex, real-world domains require a rethinking of traditional approaches to AI planning. Planning and executing the resulting plans in a dynamic environment requires a continual approachinwhich planning and execution are interleaved, there may be uncertaintyin the current and projected world state, and replanning may be required when the situation changes or planned actions fail. Furthermore, complex planning and execution problems may require multiple computational agents and human planners to collaborate on a solution. In this article, we describe a new paradigm for planning in complex, dynamic environments, whichweterm distributed,continual planning (DCP). We argue that developing DCP systems will be necessary in order for planning applications to be successful in these environments. We give a historical overview of research leading up to the current state of the art in DCP, and describe research in distributed and continual planning. The increasing emphasis on r...

People often act together with a shared purpose; they collaborate on a group action or activity. An increasing number of computer applications also require collaboration among various systems and users. The plans for such collaborative activities must be formed with others, not in isolation. Groups may persist over long periods of time (as do orchestras, sports teams, and systems administration groups), form spontaneously for a single group activity (as when a group forms for a programming project), or come together repeatedly (as do surgical teams and airline crews). A major challenge for researchers in Artificial Intelligence is to determine ways to construct computer systems that are able to act effectively as collaborative team members. Collaborative activities require more than the sum of individual plans. Participants must form commitments not only to the group action itself, but also to the activities of other participants that are in service of this group activity. Gro...

In traditional human-computer interfaces, a human master directs a computer system as a servant, telling it not only what to do, but also how to do it. Collaborative interfaces attempt to realign the roles, making the participants collaborators in solving the person’s problem. This paper describes Writer’s Aid, a system that deploys AI planning techniques to enable it to serve as an author’s collaborative assistant. Writer’s Aid differs from previous collaborative interfaces in both the kinds of actions the system partner takes and the underlying technology it uses to do so. While an author writes a document, Writer’s Aid helps in identifying and inserting citation keys and by autonomously finding and caching potentially relevant papers and their associated bibliographic information from various on-line sources. This autonomy, enabled by the use of a planning system at the core of Writer’s Aid, distinguishes this system from other collaborative interfaces. The collaborative design and its division of labor result in more efficient operation: faster and easier writing on the user’s part and more effective information gathering on the part of the system. Subjects in our laboratory user study found the system effective and the interface intuitive and easy to use. 1.

To my parents and sister.

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ABSTRACT: SharedPlans is an agent teamwork model which provides a formalisation of the conditions under which a group of agents has a collaborative plan. This paper describes some important steps towards a general implementation of SharedPlans theory. The implementation yields a flexible framework for building systems of collaborative agents.