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Collaborating Authors

 Schurr, Nathan


A General Context-Aware Framework for Improved Human-System Interactions

AI Magazine

For humans and automation to effectively collaborate and perform tasks, all participants need access to a common representation of potentially relevant situational information, or context. This article describes a general framework for building context-aware interactive intelligent systems that comprises three major functions: (1) capture human-system interactions and infer implicit context; (2) analyze and predict user intent and goals; and (3) provide effective augmentation or mitigation strategies to improve performance, such as delivering timely, personalized information and recommendations, adjusting levels of automation, or adapting visualizations. We then describe our current work towards a general platform that supports developing context-aware applications in a variety of domains. We then explore an example use case illustrating how our framework can facilitate personalized collaboration within an information management and decision support tool.


A General Context-Aware Framework for Improved Human-System Interactions

AI Magazine

For humans and automation to effectively collaborate and perform tasks, all participants need access to a common representation of potentially relevant situational information, or context. This article describes a general framework for building context-aware interactive intelligent systems that comprises three major functions: (1) capture human-system interactions and infer implicit context; (2) analyze and predict user intent and goals; and (3) provide effective augmentation or mitigation strategies to improve performance, such as delivering timely, personalized information and recommendations, adjusting levels of automation, or adapting visualizations. Our goal is to develop an approach that enables humans to interact with automation more intuitively and naturally that is reusable across domains by modeling context and algorithms at a higher-level of abstraction. We first provide an operational definition of context and discuss challenges and opportunities for exploiting context. We then describe our current work towards a general platform that supports developing context-aware applications in a variety of domains. We then explore an example use case illustrating how our framework can facilitate personalized collaboration within an information management and decision support tool. Future work includes evaluating our framework.


Reports of the AAAI 2011 Spring Symposia

AI Magazine

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2011 Spring Symposium Series Monday through Wednesday, March 21–23, 2011 at Stanford University. The titles of the eight symposia were AI and Health Communication, Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Design, AI for Business Agility, Computational Physiology, Help Me Help You: Bridging the Gaps in Human-Agent Collaboration, Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Multirobot Systems and Physical Data Structures, and Modeling Complex Adaptive Systems As If They Were Voting Processes.


Reports of the AAAI 2011 Spring Symposia

AI Magazine

The titles of the eight symposia were Artificial Intelligence and Health Communication, Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Design, Artificial Intelligence for Business Agility, Computational Physiology, Help Me Help You: Bridging the Gaps in Human-Agent Collaboration, Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Multirobot Systems and Physical Data Structures, and Modeling Complex Adaptive Systems As If They Were Voting Processes. The goal of the Artificial Intelligence and Health Communication symposium was to advance the conceptual design of automated systems that provide health services to patients and consumers through interdisciplinary insight from artificial intelligence, health communication and related areas of communication studies, discourse studies, public health, and psychology. There is a large and growing interest in the development of automated systems to provide health services to patients and consumers. In the last two decades, applications informed by research in health communication have been developed, for example, for promoting healthy behavior and for managing chronic diseases. While the value that these types of applications can offer to the community in terms of cost, access, and convenience is clear, there are still major challenges facing design of effective health communication systems. Overall, the participants found the format of the symposium engaging and constructive, and they The symposium was organized around five main expressed the desire to continue this initiative in concepts: (1) Patient empowerment and education further events.


A Testbed for Investigating Task Allocation Strategies between Air Traffic Controllers and Automated Agents

AAAI Conferences

To meet the growing demands of the National Airspace System (NAS) stakeholders and provide the level of service, safety and security needed to sustain future air transport, the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) concept calls for technologies and systems offering increasing support from automated systems that provide decision-aiding and optimization capabilities. This is an exciting application for some core aspects of Artificial Intelligence research since the automation must be designed to enable the human operators to access and process a myriad of information sources, understand heightened system complexity, and maximize capacity, throughput and fuel savings in the NAS.. This paper introduces an emerging application of techniques from mixed initiative (adjustable autonomy), multi-agent systems, and task scheduling techniques to the air traffic control domain. Consequently, we have created a testbed for investigating the critical challenges in supporting the early design of systems that allow for optimal, context-sensitive function (role) allocation between air traffic controller and automated agents. A pilot study has been conducted with the testbed and preliminary results show a marked qualitative improvement in using dynamic function allocation optimization versus static function allocation.


Reports on the 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium Series

AI Magazine

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented its 2005 Spring Symposium Series on Monday through Wednesday, March 21-23, 2005 at Stanford University in Stanford, California. The topics of the eight symposia in this symposium series were (1) AI Technologies for Homeland Security; (2) Challenges to Decision Support in a Changing World; (3) Developmental Robotics; (4) Dialogical Robots: Verbal Interaction with Embodied Agents and Situated Devices; (5) Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors; (6) Metacognition in Computation; (7) Persistent Assistants: Living and Working with AI; and (8) Reasoning with Mental and External Diagrams: Computational Modeling and Spatial Assistance.


Reports on the 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium Series

AI Magazine

Techniques in this symposium series were he calls the "twenty-first century for analyzing terrorist networks (1) AI Technologies for Homeland Security; strategic threat triad," which consists were reported by Alphatech (2) Challenges to Decision of failed states, global terrorism, and and the University of Arizona. Popp noted that and retrieving information for Robots: Verbal Interaction with convergence of these three elements counter intelligence was demonstrated Embodied Agents and Situated Devices; is highly destabilizing and a key by Jim Hendler of the University (5) Knowledge Collection from strategic concern to the national security of Maryland. They also aimed to chart out future from Stanford University, Lawrence For example, systems that are research agenda by identifying specific Livermore Laboratories, SRI International, based on probabilistic or decisiontheoretic interesting issues in various and Syracuse University. Homeland security applications for unable to cope with change by themselves, The recurrent themes from data mining and mobile robots were as neither probability theory the presentations included the following: reported by Alphatech and the University nor decision theory says much about of South Florida, respectively. How do The highlights of the symposium let alone how they should be modified.