The way we think about AI is shaped by works of science-fiction. In the big picture, fiction provides the conceptual building blocks we use to make sense of the long-term significance of "thinking machines" for our civilization and even our species. Zooming in, fiction provides the familiar narrative frame leveraged by the media coverage of new AI-powered product releases. As a result, the dominant view in the popular imagination today is that AI is about creating artificial minds, agents with a will of their own. These agents, since they possess a similar kind of autonomy as their human creators, may decide to pursue their own goals, and eventually turn against humans.

Government regulations are critical to understanding how to do business with a government entity and receive other benefits. However, government regulations are also notoriously long and organized in ways that can be confusing for novice users. Developing cognitive assistance tools that remove some of the burden from human users is of potential benefit to a variety of users. The volume of data found in United States federal government regulation suggests a multiple-step approach to process the data into machine-readable text, create an automated legal knowledge base capturing various facts and rules, and eventually building a legal question and answer system to acquire understanding from various regulations and provisions. Our work discussed in this paper represents our initial efforts to build a framework for Federal Acquisition Regulations System (Title 48, Code of Federal Regulations) in order to create an efficient legal knowledge base representing relationships between various legal elements, semantically similar terminologies, deontic expressions and cross-referenced legal facts and rules.

Today’s businesses, government and society work and services are centered around interactions, collaborations and knowledge work. The pace, amount and veracity of data generated and processed by a worker has accelerated significantly to the level that challenged human cognitive load and productivity. On the other hand, big data has provided an unprecedented opportunity for AI to tackle one of the main challenges hindering the AI progress: building models of world in a scalable, adaptive and dynamic manner. In this paper, we describe the technology requirements of building cognitive assistance technologies that assists human workers, and present a cognitive work assistant framework that aims at offering intelligence assistance to workers to improve their productivity and agility. We then describe the design and development of a set of cognitive services offered by the framework, based on advanced NLP and machine learning methods. The cognitive services help workers in processing and linking information and identifying and tracking work items over interactions in communication channels such as email, social conversations and media, chats and messaging and calendar applications. These cognitive services are designed to be adaptive, online and personalized so that over time adapt to changing environment and knowledge, and the models become personalized through learning preferences and working language and style of the subject worker.

This paper first sketches a living lab infrastructure installed in an alternative housing unit built to host 10 people with traumatic brain injury. It then presents the first research project in progress within this living lab. This interdisciplinary project aims at designing, implementing, deploying, and assessing a personalized assistive technology (PAT). Based on the needs and expectations expressed by the residents, their caregivers and their families, a cooking assistant appeared as one of the best suited PAT to foster residents autonomy and social participation. The resulting PAT will rely on pervasive computing and ambient intelligence. It will then be personalized according to each participant's capacities and specific cognitive impairments. The impact of the assistant on autonomy and quality of life will then be measured. The overall organizational impact of such assistive technology will be also documented and evaluated.