We demonstrate an embodied cognitive agent that helps scientists visualize and analyze exo-planets and their host stars. The prototype is situated in a room equipped with a large display, microphones, cameras, speakers, and pointing devices. Users communicate with the agent via speech, gestures, and combinations thereof, and it responds by displaying content and generating synthesized speech.

In this brief abstract we report work in progress on developing Mr.Jones — a proactive orchestrator and decision support agent for a collaborative decision making setting embodied by a smart room. The duties of such an agent may range across interactive problem solving with other agents in the environment, developing automated summaries of meetings, visualization of the internal decision making process, proactive data and resource management, and so on. Specifically, we highlight the importance of integrating higher level symbolic reasoning and intent recognition in the design of such an agent, and outline pathways towards the realization of these capabilities.We will demonstrate some of these functionalities here in the context of automated orchestration of a meeting in the CEL — the Cognitive Environments Laboratory at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center.

We present a system that provides an immersive experience to a remote participant collaborating with other participants using a technologically advanced "smart" meeting room. Traditional solutions for virtual collaboration, such as video conferencing or chat rooms, do not allow remote participants to access or control the technological capabilities of such rooms. In this work, we demonstrate a working system for immersive virtual telepresence in a smart conference room that does allow such control.