The ability to make decisions that balance conflicting needs and variable-quality inputs is a skill that is inherently human. In emergency situations, such capabilities are tested under pressure, as needs and inputs change---often rapidly---and deliberation must take place quickly or else opportunities are lost. This short paper identifies challenges faced when emergency services personnel are supported by human/multi-robot systems. Several strategies are proposed to address these challenges, with deployment geared toward emergency services agencies within the next 5-10 years.

Behavioral scientists contend that individuals, and organizations rarely make decisions solely on the basis of economic factors. Decisions are also shaped by perceived risk, social interactions, currency and salience of information, and other value propositions. Social diffusion of information on consumer experiences, entrance of new business models better aligned with customers’ concerns when evaluating investments, and perceived improving economic conditions are all factors in consumers’ decisions to adopt a new technology, such as solar photovoltaics (PV). We describe a new conceptual agent-based model, BE-Solar, that incorporates a social and behavioral decision framework for technology adoption decisions. We demonstrate the feasibility of including heterogeneity and behavioral factors into an agent-based model of the solar PV market, which is being applied to the Southern California market.

We present a system that produces emotionally rich poetry inspired by personalized and empathic interpretation of text, particularly Internet blogs. Our implemented system is based on the blackboard architecture, and generates poetry from a theme that it considers the most inspiring. It also incorporates a model of emotions with an individual optimism rate that defines an affective state. The poems produced by the system contain emotional expressions that describe these feelings. We explain how the system re-conceptualizes the text by the empathic interpretation of its content. We also present how the blackboard architecture may support divergent problem solving in the field of computational creativity.We describe the system architecture and the generation algorithm followed by some illustrative results. Finally, we mention possible continuation of this work by incorporating other language generating systems as well as human experts in the blackboard architecture.

Children with complex health conditions require care from a large, diverse set of caregivers that includes parents and community support organizations as well as multiple types of medical professionals. Coordination of their care is essential for good outcomes, and  extensive  research has shown that the use of integrated, team-based care plans improves care coordination. Care plans, however, are rarely deployed in practice. This paper describes barriers to effective implementation of care plans in complex care revealed by a study of care providers treating such children. It draws on teamwork theories, identifying ways AI capabilities could enhance care plan use; describes the design of GoalKeeper, a system to support providers use of care plans; and describes  initial work toward information sharing algorithms for such systems.

This paper presents an experiment investigating what type of progress feedback users prefer in verbal updates by a robot about remotely performed tasks. Of primary concern is that users find the information presented useful. But as users in their home may be engaged in other activities while they wait for a service, it is also important that information is presented in a way and at a frequency that they do not find distracting or disruptive. We explore these issues through a human-robot interaction experiment involving a simulated food delivery service. We also discuss future research directions that involve giving naive users more input into the planning process.

Robotic agents often map perceptual input to simplified representations that do not reflect the complexity and richness of the world. This simplification is due in large part to the limitations of planning algorithms, which fail in large stochastic state spaces on account of the well-known "curse of dimensionality." Existing approaches to address this problem fail to prevent autonomous agents from considering many actions which would be obviously irrelevant to a human solving the same problem. We formalize the notion of affordances as knowledge added to an Markov Decision Process (MDP) that prunes actions in a state- and reward- general way. This pruning significantly reduces the number of state-action pairs the agent needs to evaluate in order to act near-optimally. We demonstrate our approach in the Minecraft domain as a model for robotic tasks, showing significant increase in speed and reduction in state-space exploration during planning. Further, we provide a learning framework that enables an agent to learn affordances through experience, opening the door for agents to learn to adapt and plan through new situations. We provide preliminary results indicating that the learning process effectively produces affordances that help solve an MDP faster, suggesting that affordances serve as an effective, transferable piece of knowledge for planning agents in large state spaces.

In this paper we explain how IETAL agents learn their environment, and how they build their intrinsic, internal representation of it, which they then use to build their expectations when on quest to satisfy its active drives. As environments change (with or without other agents present in them), the agents learn to new and “forget” irrelevant, “old” associations made. We discuss the concept of emotional context of associations, and show a gallery of simulations of behaviors in small multiagent societies.

Empirical studies with humans and agents demonstrate that the nature and forms of information required by the human differ depending on the design of the relationship between the participants — a relationship that is sometimes characterised using the concept of levels of autonomy, though the usefulness of that characterisation has recently been questioned. Therefore, understanding how people work with automation and how to design automated systems to better support people, is a field long studied, but of growing importance. Our current work seeks to contribute to the design of representations and algorithms that can be deployed in such contexts.

AI and robotics researchers aim at having robots in our environments coexisting with humans, as artificial creatures that will help humans and collaborate with humans to improve our societies. There will be more than one robot. Robots will not interact with some humans just once, or a few times, but many times. Humans will interact with robots to change their requests and to teach and correct their behaviors. This abstract briefly discusses a few issues for AI and HRI for such challenging repeated interactions in space and time between robots and humans. We have made different levels of research progress on these issues, as we discuss. Our presentation is motivated by our work with the CoBot mobile service robots, which have been running in our environments for the last three years, and for more than 500kms.

An agent continuously performing different tasks in the same domain has the opportunity to learn, over the course of its operational lifetime, about the behavioural regularities afforded by the domain. This paper addresses the problem of learning a task independent behaviour model based on the underlying structure of a domain which is common across multiple tasks presented to an autonomous agent. Our approach involves learning action priors: a behavioural model which encodes a notion of local common sense behaviours in the domain, conditioned on either the state or observations of the agent. This knowledge is accumulated and transferred as an exploration behaviour whenever a new task is presented to the agent. The effect is that as the agent encounters more tasks, it is able to learn them faster and achieve greater overall performance. This approach is illustrated in experiments in a simulated extended navigation domain.