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The Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE 09): A Report

AI Magazine

The development of intelligent environments is considered an important step toward the realization of the ambient intelligence vision. Greece, served as program chairs. The previous four editions of the IE conference have been held at the University of Essex, UK (in 2005), at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (in 2006), at the University of Ulm, Germany (in 2007), and at the University of Washington campus in Seattle, Washington, USA (in 2008). The development of intelligent environments is About 120 delegates attended the workshops considered the first and primary step toward the and the conference. These included representatives realization of the ambient intelligence vision.


AAAI Conferences Calendar

AI Magazine

ICAART 2010 will be held January 22-24, 2010, in Valencia, Spain. This page includes forthcoming AAAI sponsored conferences, conferences presented International Conference on Intelligent by AAAI Affiliates, and conferences held in cooperation with AAAI. IUI 2010 will be Magazine also maintains a calendar listing that includes nonaffiliated conferences held February 7-10, 2010, in Hong at www.aaai.org/Magazine/calendar.php. The Twelfth International Conference The Third Conference on Artificial AAAI Spring Symposium Series will be on Principles of Knowledge Representation General Intelligence. AGI-08 will be held March 22-24, 2010 at Stanford and Reasoning.


Usability Engineering Methods for Interactive Intelligent Systems

AI Magazine

There is considerable validity to this point of view: Anyone who develops systems that are intended for use by people can benefit from familiarity with and application of these methods. Accordingly, this article offers a brief introduction to these methods, including examples and suggestions for additional reading (see in particular the Further Reading section). Even people who are already experts in the application of these methods should be aware of potential adaptations and extensions to the methods when applied to systems that are designed to incorporate significant use of AI. The theme articles by Lieberman (2009) and by Jameson (2009) in this issue discuss some of the ways in which systems that incorporate intelligence tend to differ from systems that do not, both in terms of their potential to help users and in terms of possible side effects. These and other properties of intelligent systems can affect the application of design and evaluation methods in various ways, some of which are illustrated in the case studies of this special issue. To organize our discussion, we distinguish broadly three types of activity that are involved in usability engineering: understanding users' needs, interaction design, and evaluation. Except for the fact that understanding users' needs tends to occur early in the design process, these activities generally proceed in parallel and complement each other.


Mixed-Initiative Interface Personalization as a Case Study in Usable AI

AI Magazine

Interface personalization aims to streamline the process of working in a feature-rich application by providing the user with an adapted interface tailored specifically to his/her needs. The MICA (Mixed-Initiative Customization Assistance) system explores a middle ground between two opposing approaches to personalization: (1) an adaptable approach, where personalization is fully user controlled and (2) and adaptive approach, where personalization is fully system controlled. We overview MICA’s strategy for providing user-adaptive recommendations to help users decide how to personalize their interfaces. In doing so, we focus primarily on how MICA handles threats to usability that are often found in adaptive interfaces including obtrusiveness and lack of understandability and control. We also describe how we evaluated MICA and highlight results from these evaluations.


AI and HCI: Two Fields Divided by a Common Focus

AI Magazine

Although AI and HCI explore computing and intelligent behavior and the fields have seen some cross-over, until recently there was not very much. This article outlines a history of the fields that identifies some of the forces that kept the fields at arm’s length. AI was generally marked by a very ambitious, long-term vision requiring expensive systems, although the term was rarely envisioned as being as long as it proved to be, whereas HCI focused more on innovation and improvement of widely-used hardware within a short time-scale. These differences led to different priorities, methods, and assessment approaches.  A consequence was competition for resources, with HCI flourishing in AI winters and moving more slowly when AI was in favor. The situation today is much more promising, in part because of platform convergence: AI can be exploited on widely-used systems.



Report on the 2nd International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-09)

AI Magazine

General Intelligence, was held March 6-9 in Arlington, Virginia. Pascal Hitzler chaired the program committee. The first day of the conference featured in-depth tutorials on leading AGI systems and approaches, including introductions to the SOAR, Texai, and OpenCog software, and overviews of the logic-based, reinforcement learning and program-induction approaches to AGI. Following this, the main conference on Saturday and Sunday featured a number of themed sessions: Evaluation and Metrics (chaired by John Laird), Robotics and Embodiment (chaired by Itamar Arel), Cognitive Architectures (chaired by Pei Wang and Stephen Reed), Logical Approaches to AGI (chaired by Selmer Bringsjord), Learning and Reasoning (chaired by Selmer Bringsjord), Speech and Language (chaired by Moshe Looks), and Self-Awareness and Consciousness (chaired by Ben Goertzel). There were fewer industry participants because in early 2009 (due to the global economic crisis) many U.S. firms were restricting On the other hand there was an Emanuel Kitzelmann, Martin Hofmann, and Ute even greater international participation, including Schmid, from the Cognitive Systems Group at the a keynote speech by Juergen Schmidhuber (from University of Bamberg, who work in the AI tradition IDSIA, in Lugano, Switzerland, and the Technical of "inductive programing." Their paper University of Munich) and a large number of presentations described a clever way to reformulate the conclusions from German researchers.


Report on the 22nd International FLAIRS Conference

AI Magazine

The 22nd International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-22) was held 19th – 21st May 2009 at the Sundial Beach and Golf Resort on Sanibel Island, Florida, USA.  It continued a long tradition of FLAIRS conferences, which attract researchers from around the world.  The conference featured technical papers, special tracks, and invited speakers.  This year’s conference was chaired by Susan Haller, from the State University of New York at Potsdam.  Conference program co-chairs were Hans W. Guesgen, from Massey University in New Zealand, and H. Chad Lane, from the University of Southern California.  The special tracks were coordinated by Philip McCarthy, from the University of Memphis.


Designing for Usability of an Adaptive Time Management Assistant

AI Magazine

This case study article describes the iterative design process of an adaptive, mixed-initiative calendaring tool with embedded artificial intelligence.  We establish the specific types of assistance in which the target user population expressed interest, and we highlight our findings regarding the scheduling practices and the reminding preferences of these users.  These findings motivated the redesign and enhancement of our intelligent system.  Lessons learned from the study—namely, highlighting the merits of usability toward widespread adoption and retention, and that simple problems that perhaps do not necessitate complex AI-based solutions should not go unattended merely due to their inherent simplicity—conclude the article, along with a discussion of the importance of the iterative design process for any user adaptive system.


Mediating between AI and highly specialized users

AI Magazine

We report part of the design experience gained in X-Media, a system for knowledge management and sharing. Consolidated techniques of interaction design (scenario-based design) had to be revisited to capture the richness and complexity of intelligent interactive systems. We show that the design of intelligent systems requires methodologies (faceted scenarios) that support the investigation of intelligent features and usability factors simultaneously. Interaction designers become mediators between intelligent technology and users, and have to facilitate reciprocal understanding.