A Human-Centered Approach for Designing Decision Support Systems

The choice to include the human in the decision process affects four key areas of system design: problem representation, system analysis and design, solution technique selection, and interface requirements specification. I introduce a design methodology that captures the necessary choices associated with each of these areas. In particular I show how this methodology is applied to the design of an actual decision Support system for satellite operations scheduling. Supporting the user\u27s ability to monitor the actions of the system and to guide the decision process of the system are two key considerations in the successful design of a decision support system. Both of these points rely on the correct specification of human-computer interaction points. Traditional, computer-centered system design approaches do not do this well, if at all, and are insufficient for the design of decision support systems. These approaches typically leave the definition of human-computer interaction points till after the component and system level designs are complete. This is too late however since the component and system level design decisions can impose inflexible constraints on the choice of the human-computer interaction points. This often leads to the design of human-computer interaction points that are only good enough. These approaches result in ill-conceived problem representations and poor user-system interaction points because the system lacks the underlying architecture to support these constructs efficiently. Decision support systems require a new, human-centered design approach rather than the traditional computer-centered approaches

Determining the Value of Information for Collaborative Multi-Agent Planning

This paper addresses the problem of computing the value of information in settings in which the people using an autonomous-agent system have access to information not directly available to the system itself. To know whether to interrupt a user for this information, the agent needs to determine its value. The fact that the agent typically does not know the exact information the user has and so must evaluate several alternative possibilities significantly increases the complexity of the value-of-information calculation. The paper addresses this problem as it arises in multi-agent task planning and scheduling with architectures in which information about the task schedule resides in a separate “scheduler” module. For such systems, calculating the value to overall agent performance of potential new information requires that the system component that interacts with the user query the scheduler. The cost of this querying and inter-module communication itself substantially affects system performance and must be taken into account. The paper provides a decision-theoretic algorithm for determining the value of information the system might acquire, query-reduction methods that decrease the number of queries the algorithm makes to the scheduler, and methods for ordering the queries to enable faster decision-making. These methods were evaluated in the context of a collaborative interface for an automated scheduling agent. Experimental results demonstrate the significant decrease achieved by using the query-reduction methods in the number of queries needed for reasoning about the value of information. They also show the ordering methods substantially increase the rate of value accumulation, enabling faster determination of whether to interrupt the user.Engineering and Applied Science

Ambient intelligence in emotion based ubiquitous decision making

As the time goes on, it is a question of common sense to involve in the process of decision making people scattered around the globe. Groups are created in a formal or informal way, exchange ideas or engage in a process of argumentation and counterargumentation, negotiate, cooperate, collaborate or even discuss techniques and/or methodologies for problem solving. In this work it is proposed an agent-based architecture to support a ubiquitous group decision support system, i.e. based on the concept of agent, which is able to exhibit intelligent, and emotional-aware behaviour, and support argumentation, through interaction with individual persons or groups. It is enforced the paradigm of Mixed Initiative Systems, so the initiative is to be pushed by human users and/or intelligent agents

Ambient intelligence in emotion based ubiquitous decision making

As the time goes on, it is a question of common sense to involve in the process of decision making people scattered around the globe. Groups are cre- ated in a formal or informal way, exchange ideas or engage in a process of argumentation and counter- argumentation, negotiate, cooperate, collaborate or even discuss techniques and/or methodologies for problem solving. In this work it is proposed an agent-based architecture to support a ubiquitous group decision support system, i.e. based on the concept of agent, which is able to exhibit intelli- gent, and emotional-aware behaviour, and support argumentation, through interaction with individual persons or groups. It is enforced the paradigm of Mixed Initiative Systems, so the initiative is to be pushed by human users and/or intelligent agents

Synchronization in an Asynchronous Agent-based Architecture for Dialogue Systems

Most dialogue architectures are either pipelined or, if agent-based, are restricted to a pipelined flow-of-information. The TRIPS dialogue architecture is agent-based and asynchronous, with several layers of information flow. We present this architecture and the synchronization issues we encountered in building a truly distributed, agentbased dialogue architecture

Ada (trademark) projects at NASA. Runtime environment issues and recommendations

Ada practitioners should use this document to discuss and establish common short term requirements for Ada runtime environments. The major current Ada runtime environment issues are identified through the analysis of some of the Ada efforts at NASA and other research centers. The runtime environment characteristics of major compilers are compared while alternate runtime implementations are reviewed. Modifications and extensions to the Ada Language Reference Manual to address some of these runtime issues are proposed. Three classes of projects focusing on the most critical runtime features of Ada are recommended, including a range of immediately feasible full scale Ada development projects. Also, a list of runtime features and procurement issues is proposed for consideration by the vendors, contractors and the government