Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Readings and responses 2. Preface to the 1st edition 3. Introduction to the 1st edition 4. Interactive artifacts 5. Plans 6. Situated actions 7. Communicative resources 8. Case and methods 9. Human-machine communication 10. Conclusion to the 1st edition 11. Plans, scripts and other ordering devices 12. Agencies at the interface 13. Figuring the human in AI and robotics 14. Demystifications and re-enchantments of the human-like machine 15. Reconfigurations Notes References.

Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions

The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. In this article, we present a survey of what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. The article also includes a short review of current and potential applications of agent technology, and closes with a glossary of key terms, an annotated list of systems, and a detailed bibliography. Pointers to further reading are provided throughout.

/pdf/agent-theories-architectures-and-languages-a-survey-4m08hmierd.pdf

Agent theories, architectures, and languages: a survey

This study attempts a new conceptualization of communication “sources” by proposing a typology of sources that would apply not only to traditional media but also to new online media. Ontological rationale for the distinctions in the typology is supplemented by psychological evidence via an experiment that investigated the effects of different types of source attributions upon receivers’ perception of online news content. Participants (N = 48) in a 4-condition, between-participants experiment read 6 identical news stories each through an online service. Participants were told that the stories were selected by 1 of 4 sources: news editors, the computer terminal on which they were accessing the stories, other audience members (or users) of the online news service, or (using a pseudo-selection task) the individual user (self). After reading each online news story, all participants filled out a paperand-pencil questionnaire indicating their perceptions of the story they had just read. In confirmation of the distinctions made in the typology, attribution of identical content to 4 different types of online sources was associated with significant variation in news story perception. Theoretical implications of the results as well as the typology are discussed.

https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~nan/738readings/Sundar%20Nass%202010%20sources%20of%20online%20news.pdf

Conceptualizing Sources in Online News

S ince the beginning of recorded history, people have been fascinated with the idea of non-human agencies. 1 Popular notions about androids, hu-manoids, robots, cyborgs, and science fiction creatures permeate our culture , forming the unconscious backdrop against which software agents are perceived. The word " robot, " derived from the Czech word for drudgery, became popular following Karel Capek's 1921 play RUR: Rossum Universal Robots. While Capek's robots were factory workers, the public has also at times embraced the romantic dream of robots as " digital butlers " who, like the mechanical maid in the animated feature " The Jetsons, " would someday putter about the living room performing mundane household tasks. Despite such innocuous beginnings, the dominant public image of artificially intelligent embodied creatures often has been more a nightmare than a dream. Would the awesome power of robots reverse the master-slave relationship with humans? Everyday experiences of computer users with the mysteries of ordinary software, riddled with annoying bugs, incomprehensible features, and dangerous viruses reinforce the fear that the software powering autonomous creatures would pose even more problems. The more intelligent the robot, the more capable of pursuing its own self-interest rather than its master's. The more humanlike the robot, the more likely to exhibit human frailties and eccentricities. Such latent concerns cannot be ignored in the design of software agents—indeed, there is more than a grain of truth in each of them! Though automata of various sorts have existed for centuries, it is only with the development of computers and control theory since World War II that anything resembling autonomous agents has begun to appear. Norman (1997) observes that perhaps " the most relevant predecessors to today's intelligent agents are servomechanisms and other control devices, including factory control and the automated takeoff, landing, and flight control of aircraft. " However, the agents now being contemplated differ in important ways from earlier concepts.

/pdf/an-introduction-to-software-agents-5mphh3nl3f.pdf

An introduction to software agents

The development of cognitive science is one of the most remarkable and fascinating intellectual achievements of the modern era. The quest to understand the mind is as old as recorded human thought; but the progress of modern science has offered new methods and techniques which have revolutionized this enquiry. Oxford University Press now presents a masterful history of cognitive science, told by one of its most eminent practitioners. Cognitive science is the project of understanding the mind by modeling its workings. Psychology is its heart, but it draws together various adjoining fields of research, including artificial intelligence; neuroscientific study of the brain; philosophical investigation of mind, language, logic, and understanding; computational work on logic and reasoning; linguistic research on grammar, semantics, and communication; and anthropological explorations of human similarities and differences. Each discipline, in its own way, asks what the mind is, what it does, how it works, how it developed - how it is even possible. The key distinguishing characteristic of cognitive science, Boden suggests, compared with older ways of thinking about the mind, is the notion of understanding the mind as a kind of machine. She traces the origins of cognitive science back to Descartes's revolutionary ideas, and follows the story through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the pioneers of psychology and computing appear. Then she guides the reader through the complex interlinked paths along which the study of the mind developed in the twentieth century. Cognitive science, in Boden's broad conception, covers a wide range of aspects of mind: not just 'cognition' in the sense of knowledge or reasoning, but emotion, personality, social communication, and even action. In each area of investigation, Boden introduces the key ideas and the people who developed them. No one else could tell this story as Boden can: she has been an active participant in cognitive science since the 1960s, and has known many of the key figures personally. Her narrative is written in a lively, swift-moving style, enriched by the personal touch of someone who knows the story at first hand. Her history looks forward as well as back: it is her conviction that cognitive science today--and tomorrow--cannot be properly understood without a historical perspective. Mind as Machine will be a rich resource for anyone working on the mind, in any academic discipline, who wants to know how our understanding of our mental activities and capacities has developed.

Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science

A conversation with Marvin Minsky about agents

integrated Of Agents he study of software agents has resulted in a diverse set of views and realizations. One such view has focused on building a specialized agent that can assist a user by performing a specific task, such as scheduling a \" itinerary or ranking and presenting email and news or infosurfing (browsing or searching for information) over the Internet or reasoning bow to best support human-computer interactions [4, 9, 201. A second area of study concerns integrating the performance of sets of these specialized agenu [5]. For example, several individuals wishing to get together might have their respective agents schedule a meeting. Another approach to building a \" agent entails revising the role of the agent. In this case, I take the position that it takes many \" integrated agents \" to create a \" \" assistant. \" In such a \" approach, many different reasoning processes, so&ties of agents, are integrated in order to realize a software assistant capable of performing a broad range of tasks. This approach has resulted in the realization of M, a software assistant, \" who \" attempts to recognize, classify, index, store, retrieve , explain, and present information relating to human-computer interaction in a desktop multimedia conferencing environment. M is a software system that integrates muhi-pie \" reasoning agents \" whose collab-orative results serve to assist a user working together with other individuals in a \" electronic conference room. The domain of integrated and multistrategy reasoning and learning has been a \" active research area studied in a variety of problems and projects several recommended are [I-3, 6-8, 10, 11, 161. From my studies in this domain, the resulting design and implementation of M's architecture posed many interesting questions. How do you coordinate and manage a diverse set of agents? How do the agents communicate? What knowledge is required by a \" agent and is it shared with other agents? Do the agents know ofone another and if so, what relationships exist? Does a \" agent demonstrate \" intelligent \" behavior or does \" intelligent \" behavior emerge from the coexistence of the \" active \" state of the many diverse agents? In addressing these questions, a design theory for a \" architecture of integrated agents, influenced by Minsky's Society of Mind (SOM) theory [12, 131, was defined and implemented. In this work, aspects of spatial , structural, functional, temporal, causal, explanation-based, …

M: an architecture of integrated agents

Intelligent Agents - Introduction to the Special Issue.

Intelligent agents

In this talk I wish to consider and examine both current research and “state of the art” technologies applied in advancing human-computer interaction. With a focus on user interfaces, a critical question will be addressed. What makes an Intelligent User Interface (IUI) intelligent? This question provides two distinct venues of investigation. First, the implications of a user’s “human intelligence” as applied in a set of dialogs and goal-directed tasks performed collectively by both a user and a computer. Second, the potential ability for computers to perform in such a manner that they elicit users to interpret a computer’s actions as providing a type of “conscious” behavior. The essence of this investigation will attempt to determine: “where is the intelligence?” During this investigation several key questions will act as guides. How can user interfaces engage users to act more intelligently? What empirical knowledge regarding the presentation of information can be applied in the design of user interfaces and dialog models? How will users perceive and accept the evolving ability of computers to perform surrogate tasks correctly? What are current and future potential models of interactive computing? How useful are sophisticated reasoning and knowledge-base technologies in UI design? What impact does the “WIRED” and ~~CYBERM generations f u ers have on the evolution of

Doug Riecken

Papers

A conversation with Marvin Minsky about agents

M: an architecture of integrated agents

Intelligent Agents - Introduction to the Special Issue.

Intelligent agents

What makes an intelligent user interface intelligent (abstract)