Though attention to evaluating human-robot interfaces has increased in recent years, there are relatively few reports of using evaluation tools during the development of humanrobot interaction (HRI) systems to improve their designs. Heuristic evaluation is a technique suitable for such applications that has become popular in the humancomputer interaction (HCI) community. However, it requires usability heuristics applicable to the system environment. This work contributes a set of heuristics appropriate for use with HRI systems, derived from a variety of sources both in and out of the HRI field. Evaluators have successfully used the heuristics on an HRI system, demonstrating their utility against standard measures of heuristic effectiveness.

This agent receives on-the-fiy requests from other (human) agents for tasks such as: bring copies of paper to David today, bring a book to George this afternoon, or warn Ronny immediately that a meeting is postponed. Each task requires a sequence of actions, such as: go to the location of the paper, get the paper, take the paper to the copy room, etc. The agent must plan its actions in real time in order to react effectively to the incoming stream of requested tasks.

Dhiraj K. Pathak 1, Eric P. Hoffman 2, and 1 Mark W. Perlin 1 Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University 2 Department of Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry, University of Pittsburgh Abstract This paper describes a knowledge-based system for molecular diagnostics, and its application to fully automated diagnosis of X-hnked genetic disorders. Molecular diagnostic information is used in chnical practice for determining genetic risks, such as carrier determination and prenatal diagnosis. Initially, blood samples are obtained from related individuals, and PCR amphfication is performed. Linkage-based molecular diagnosis then entails three data analysis steps. First, for every individual, the alleles (i.e., DNA composition) are determined at specified chromosomal locations. Second, the flow of genetic material among the individuals is established. Third, the probability that a given individual is either a carrier of the disease or affected by the disease is determined. The current practice is to perform each of these three steps manually, which is costly, time consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone. As such, the knowledge-intensive data analysis and interpretation supersede the actual experimentation effort as the major bottleneck in molecular diagnostics.

In the design and construction of mobile robots vision has always been one of the most potentially useful sensory systems. In practice however, it has also become the most difficult to successfully implement. At the MIT Mobile Robotics (Mobot) Lab we have designed a small, light, cheap, and low power Mobot Vision System that can be used to guide a mobile robot in a constrained environment. The target environment is the surface of Mars, although we believe the system should be applicable to other conditions as well. It is our belief that the constraints of the Martian environment will allow the implementation of a system that provides vision based guidance to a small mobile rover.