Explorations in engagement for humans and robots

This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among human interactors--the effect of tracking faces during an interaction. It also describes the architecture of a robot that can participate in conversational, collaborative interactions with engagement gestures. Finally, the paper reports on findings of experiments with human participants who interacted with a robot when it either performed or did not perform engagement gestures. Results of the human-robot studies indicate that people become engaged with robots: they direct their attention to the robot more often in interactions where engagement gestures are present, and they find interactions more appropriate when engagement gestures are present than when they are not.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

Models of Plans to Support Communication: An Initial Report

Agents collaborating to achieve a goal bring to their joint activity different beliefs about ways in which to achieve the goal and the actions necessary for doing so. Thus, a model of collaboration must provide a way of representing and distinguishing among agents’ beliefs and of stating the ways in which the intentions of different agents contribute to achieving their goal. Furthermore, in collaborative activity, collaboration occurs in the planning process itself. Thus, rather than modelling plan recognition, per se, what must be modelled is the augmentation of beliefs about the actions of multiple agents and their intentions. In this paper, we modify and expand the SharedPlan model of collaborative behavior (Grosz and Sidner 1990). We present an algorithm for updating an agent’s beliefs about a partial SharedPlan and describe an initial implementation of this algorithm in the domain of network management.Engineering and Applied Science

Hosting Activities: Experience with and Future Directions for a Robot Agent Host

This paper discusses hosting activities. Hosting activities are a general class of collaborative activity in which an agent provides guidance in the form of information, entertainment, education or other services in the user’s environment (which may be an artificial or the natural world) and may also request that the human user undertake actions to support the fulfillment of those services. This paper reports on experience in building a robot agent for hosting activities, both the architecture and applications being used. The paper then turns to a range of issues to be addressed in creating hosting agents, especially robotic ones. The issues include the tasks and capabilities needed for hosting agents, and social relations, especially human trust of agent hosts. Lastly the paper proposes a new evaluation metric for hosting agents

Building Spoken Language Collaborative Interface Agents

This article reports on experiences with collaborative interface agents using spoken dialogue to collaborate with users working with graphical user interface applications. Collaborative interface agents provide users with the means to manage tasks and leave many of the details to the agent. The article presents four different collaborative agents and associated applications. It reports on lessons learned in building these agents, including the importance of choosing tasks that relieve the user of unnecessary detail, and providing speech capabilities that are useable for a wide range of users. In particular, the article reports on the success in developing a subset language for speech understanding in one of the agents. Finally, the article discusses the advantages of using the explanation capabilities in collaborative agents to help users learn new interface functionality

Merl -- A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory

We take the position that autonomous agents, when they interact with people, should be governed by the same principles that underlie human collaboration

Segmented interaction history in a collaborative interface agent

csidnerQlotus. com We have developed an application-independent toolkit, called Collagen, based on the SharedPlan theory of collaborative discourse, in which interaction histories are hierarchically structured according to a user’s goals and intentions. We have used Collagen to implement an example collaborative interface agent with discourse processing, but not natural language understanding. In this paper, we concentrate on how a segmented interaction history supports user orientation, intelligent assistance, and transformations, such as returning to earlier points in the problem solving process and replaying segments in a new context