Realising Team-Working in the Field: An Agent-based Approach

Multi-agent systems technology is applied to enable co-operation between mobile workers in the field, minimising user intervention and increasing reachability. A component-based approach is taken to simplify the management of deployed co-operation services. A Personal Assistant running on a mobile device is introduced to show how an intelligent and autonomous agent can increase the utility of users during workforce co-operation processes. Finally, a real world trial of the technology by network installation and maintenance engineers in the UK is described. Some technical issues revealed during the trial are discussed, as is the impact of the technology on the business process

Can Large Language Models Be Good Companions? An LLM-Based Eyewear System with Conversational Common Ground

Developing chatbots as personal companions has long been a goal of artificial intelligence researchers. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have delivered a practical solution for endowing chatbots with anthropomorphic language capabilities. However, it takes more than LLMs to enable chatbots that can act as companions. Humans use their understanding of individual personalities to drive conversations. Chatbots also require this capability to enable human-like companionship. They should act based on personalized, real-time, and time-evolving knowledge of their owner. We define such essential knowledge as the \textit{common ground} between chatbots and their owners, and we propose to build a common-ground-aware dialogue system from an LLM-based module, named \textit{OS-1}, to enable chatbot companionship. Hosted by eyewear, OS-1 can sense the visual and audio signals the user receives and extract real-time contextual semantics. Those semantics are categorized and recorded to formulate historical contexts from which the user's profile is distilled and evolves over time, i.e., OS-1 gradually learns about its user. OS-1 combines knowledge from real-time semantics, historical contexts, and user-specific profiles to produce a common-ground-aware prompt input into the LLM module. The LLM's output is converted to audio, spoken to the wearer when appropriate.We conduct laboratory and in-field studies to assess OS-1's ability to build common ground between the chatbot and its user. The technical feasibility and capabilities of the system are also evaluated. OS-1, with its common-ground awareness, can significantly improve user satisfaction and potentially lead to downstream tasks such as personal emotional support and assistance.Comment: 36 pages, 25 figures, Under review at ACM IMWU

Trust and Privacy Permissions for an Ambient World

Ambient intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous computing allow us to consider a future where computation is embedded into our daily social lives. This vision raises its own important questions and augments the need to understand how people will trust such systems and at the same time achieve and maintain privacy. As a result, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study of people’s attitudes to potential AmI scenarios with a view to eliciting their privacy concerns. This chapter describes recent research related to privacy and trust with regard to ambient technology. The method used in the study is described and findings discussed

The 10 Research Topics in the Internet of Things

Since the term first coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant momentum as a technology to connect physical objects to the Internet and to facilitate machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communications. Over the past two decades, IoT has been an active area of research and development endeavours by many technical and commercial communities. Yet, IoT technology is still not mature and many issues need to be addressed. In this paper, we identify 10 key research topics and discuss the research problems and opportunities within these topics.Comment: 10 pages. IEEE CIC 2020 vision pape