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

Trust is arguably the most crucial aspect of agent acceptability. At its simplest level, it can be characterized in terms of judgments that people make concerning three factors: an agent's competence, its benevolence, and the degree to which it can be rapidly and reliably brought into compliance when things go wrong. Adjustable autonomy consists of the ability to dynamically impose and modify constraints that affect the range of actions that the human-agent team can successfully perform, consistently allowing the highest degrees of useful autonomy while maintaining an acceptable level of trust. Many aspects of adjustable autonomy can be addressed through policy. Policies are a means to dynamically regulate the behavior of system components without changing code or requiring the cooperation of the components being governed. By changing policies, a system can be adjusted to accommodate variations in externally imposed constraints and environmental conditions. In this paper we describe some important dimensions relating to autonomy and give examples of how these dimensions might be adjusted in order to enhance performance of human-agent teams. We introduce Kaa (KAoS adjustable autonomy) and provide a brief comparison with two other implementations of adjustable autonomy concepts.

Toward trustworthy adjustable autonomy in KAoS

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 ofthe strengths and limitations ofk ey 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 ofthe problem. We define four categories ofdif ficulties ofthe 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.

/pdf/dynamic-distributed-resource-allocation-a-distributed-27qxhim3df.pdf

Dynamic Distributed Resource Allocation: A Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Approach

In this paper, we outline an approach to policy-based coordination in joint human-agent activity. The approach is grounded in a theory of joint activity originally developed in the context of discourse, and now applied to the broader realm of human-agent interaction. We have been gradually implementing selected aspects of policy-based coordination within the KAoS services framework and have been developing a body of examples that guide additional testing of these ideas through detailed studies of work practice.

/pdf/policy-based-coordination-in-joint-human-agent-activity-3dlc7p7ni9.pdf

Policy-based coordination in joint human-agent activity

In this paper we present the results of experiments comparing (a) rich syntactic and semantic feature sets and (b) big context windows, for the TempEval time expression and event segmentation and classification tasks. We show that it is possible for models using only lexical features to approach the performance of models using rich syntactic and semantic feature sets.

https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/semeval-2013/accepted/58_Paper.pdf

ATT1: Temporal Annotation Using Big Windows and Rich Syntactic and Semantic Features

The Multimodal Virtual Assistant (MVA) is an application that enables users to plan an outing through an interactive multimodal dialog with a mobile device. MVA demonstrates how a cloud-based multimodal language processing infrastructure can support mobile multimodal interaction. This demonstration will highlight incremental recognition, multimodal speech and gesture input, contextually-aware language understanding, and the targeted clarification of potentially incorrect segments within user input.

/pdf/mva-the-multimodal-virtual-assistant-245cnuqg5l.pdf

Hyuckchul Jung

Papers

Toward trustworthy adjustable autonomy in KAoS

Dynamic Distributed Resource Allocation: A Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Approach

Policy-based coordination in joint human-agent activity

ATT1: Temporal Annotation Using Big Windows and Rich Syntactic and Semantic Features

MVA: The Multimodal Virtual Assistant