In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of \"meaning, \" a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians.

/pdf/situations-and-attitudes-57f065zg2d.pdf

Situations and Attitudes.

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has recently received considerable attention in the academic community, in labs, in technology companies, and through the media. Because of this attention, it is desirable to present a survey of HRI to serve as a tutorial to people outside the field and to promote discussion of a unified vision of HRI within the field. The goal of this review is to present a unified treatment of HRI-related problems, to identify key themes, and discuss challenge problems that are likely to shape the field in the near future. Although the review follows a survey structure, the goal of presenting a coherent "story" of HRI means that there are necessarily some well-written, intriguing, and influential papers that are not referenced. Instead of trying to survey every paper, we describe the HRI story from multiple perspectives with an eye toward identifying themes that cross applications. The survey attempts to include papers that represent a fair cross section of the universities, government efforts, industry labs, and countries that contribute to HRI, and a cross section of the disciplines that contribute to the field, such as human, factors, robotics, cognitive psychology, and design.

/pdf/human-robot-interaction-a-survey-4q8yi606a9.pdf

Human-Robot Interaction: A Survey

Normal accidents. Living with high-risk technologies

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

The various methods and devices described herein relate to devices which, in at least certain embodiments, may include one or more sensors for providing data relating to user activity and at least one processor for causing the device to respond based on the user activity which was determined, at least in part, through the sensors. The response by the device may include a change of state of the device, and the response may be automatically performed after the user activity is determined.

Automated Response to and Sensing of User Activity in Portable Devices

Voice enabled dialog with web pages is provided. An Internet address of a web page is received including an area with which a user of a client device can specify information. The web page is loaded using the received Internet address of the web page. A task structure of the web page is then extracted. An abstract representation of the web is then generated. A dialog script, based on the abstract representation of the web page is then provided. Spoken information received from the user is converted into text and the converted text is inserted into the area.

Voice-enabled dialog interaction with web pages

In distributed resource allocation a set of agents must assign their resources to a set of tasks. This problem arises in many real-world domains such as distributed sensor networks, disaster rescue, hospital scheduling and others. Despite the variety of approaches proposed for distributed resource allocation, a systematic formalization of the problem, explaining the different sources of difficulties, and a formal explanation of the strengths and limitations of key approaches is missing. We take a step towards this goal by proposing a formalization of distributed resource allocation that represents both dynamic and distributed aspects of the problem. We define four categories of difficulties of the problem. To address this formalized problem, the paper defines the notion of Dynamic Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem (DyDCSP). The central contribution of the paper is a generalized mapping from distributed resource allocation to DyDCSP. This mapping is proven to correctly perform resource allocation problems of specific difficulty. This theoretical result is verified in practice by an implementation on a real-world distributed sensor network.

Dynamic distributed resource allocation: A distributed constraint Satisfaction approach

Today within the AAMAS community, we see at least four competing approaches to building multiagent systems: belief-desire-intention (BDI), distributed constraint optimization (DCOP), distributed POMDPs, and auctions or game-theoretic approaches. While there is exciting progress within each approach, there is a lack of cross-cutting research. This paper highlights hybrid approaches for multiagent teamwork. In particular, for the past decade, the TEAMCORE research group has focused on building agent teams in complex, dynamic domains. While our early work was inspired by BDI, we will present an overview of recent research that uses DCOPs and distributed POMDPs in building agent teams. While DCOP and distributed POMDP algorithms provide promising results, hybrid approaches help us address problems of scalability and expressiveness. For example, in the BDI-POMDP hybrid approach, BDI team plans are exploited to improve POMDP tractability, and POMDPs improve BDI team plan performance. We present some recent results from applying this approach in a Disaster Rescue simulation domain being developed with help from the Los Angeles Fire Department.

/pdf/conflicts-in-teamwork-hybrids-to-the-rescue-4yri6a9fxx.pdf

Conflicts in teamwork: hybrids to the rescue

We present an end-to-end system that processes narrative clinical records, constructs timelines for the medical histories of patients, and visualizes the results. This work is motivated by real clinical records and our general approach is based on deep semantic natural language understanding.

/pdf/building-timelines-from-narrative-clinical-records-initial-4hgcsrwyx1.pdf

Building Timelines from Narrative Clinical Records: Initial Results Based-on Deep Natural Language Understanding

Coordination is an essential ingredient of joint activity in human-agent-robot teams. In this paper, we discuss some of the challenges and requirements for successful coordination, and briefly how we have used KAoS HART services framework to support coordination in a multi-team human-robot field exercise.

/pdf/from-tools-to-teammates-joint-activity-in-human-agent-robot-51yj73k64m.pdf

Hyuckchul Jung

Papers

Voice-enabled dialog interaction with web pages

Dynamic distributed resource allocation: A distributed constraint Satisfaction approach

Conflicts in teamwork: hybrids to the rescue

Building Timelines from Narrative Clinical Records: Initial Results Based-on Deep Natural Language Understanding

From Tools to Teammates: Joint Activity in Human-Agent-Robot Teams