Learning by Demonstration for a Collaborative Planning Environment

We describe the deployment of a learning by demonstration capability to support user creation of automated procedures in a collaborative planning environment that is used widely by the U.S. Army. This technology, which has been in operational use since the summer of 2010, has helped to reduce user work loads by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. The technology has also provided the unexpected benefit of enabling standardization of products and processes. Recent technical advances have enabled its use for automating increasingly complex tasks (Allen et al. 2007; Blythe et al. 2008; Burstein et al. 2008; Leshed et al. 2008; Cypher et al. 2010). However, fielded applications of the technology have been limited to macro recording capabilities, which can only reproduce the exact behavior demonstrated by the user.