On Chatbots Exhibiting Goal-Directed Autonomy in Dynamic Environments

Conversation interfaces (CIs), or chatbots, are a popular form of intelligent agents that engage humans in task-oriented or informal conversation. In this position paper and demonstration, we argue that chatbots working in dynamic environments, like with sensor data, can not only serve as a promising platform to research issues at the intersection of learning, reasoning, representation and execution for goal-directed autonomy; but also handle non-trivial business applications. We explore the underlying issues in the context of Water Advisor, a preliminary multi-modal conversation system that can access and explain water quality data.Comment: 3 page

Decision-support for the Masses by Enabling Conversations with Open Data

Open data refers to data that is freely available for reuse. Although there has been rapid increase in availability of open data to public in the last decade, this has not translated into better decision-support tools for them. We propose intelligent conversation generators as a grand challenge that would automatically create data-driven conversation interfaces (CIs), also known as chatbots or dialog systems, from open data and deliver personalized analytical insights to users based on their contextual needs. Such generators will not only help bring Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions for important societal problems to the masses but also advance AI by providing an integrative testbed for human-centric AI and filling gaps in the state-of-art towards this aim.Comment: 6 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1803.0978