Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, January 17, 16:15, Building 17, Seminar Room

Planning and Acting Together: Getting Computer Systems to Function as Team Players

As a result of the ubiquity of computer networks, computer systems are increasingly acting as elements in a complex, distributed community of people and systems, rather than operating as solitary devices employed by a single person. Individuals in such communities may interact in various ways---competing, coordinating, collaborating. This talk will focus on those multi-agent scenarios and applications in which groups of agents work together to accomplish a joint activity or to achieve a common goal, that is, on situations in which agents collaborate. Plans for such collaborative activities must be formed with others, not in isolation. Many applications require such collaborative endeavors, and a major challenge for computer science is to determine ways to construct computer systems that are able to act effectively as collaborative team members.

Teams may consist solely of computer agents, but often include both systems and people. They may persist over long periods of time, form spontaneously for a single group activity, or come together repeatedly. In this talk, I will briefly review the major features of one model of collaborative planning, SharedPlans (Grosz and Kraus, 1996, 1999) and will describe efforts to develop collaborative planning agents and systems for human-computer communication based on this model. The model also provides a framework in which to raise and address fundamental questions about collaboration and the construction of collaboration-capable agents. I will discuss recent approaches to three plan management processes---assessment of alternatives, commitment management, and group decision-making for recipe selection and task allocation---and will raise several challenges for future research.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Hans Uszkoreit.