Collagen: Applying Collaborative Discourse Theory To Human-Computer Interaction

Speaker
Charles Rich
Research Scientist, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

The overall goal of this research is to apply the SharedPlan theory of human collaborative discourse, developed by Grosz, Sidner, et al., to improve human-computer interaction. Specifically, we have developed application-independent Java middleware, called COLLAGEN (for COLLaborative AGENt), which automatically constructs and maintains a representation of the collaborative discourse context, structured according to an underlying task model and the user’s current goals. We have used COLLAGEN to build a number of prototype collaborative agents across a wide spectrum of collaboration modes and application domains, ranging from intelligent tutoring to human-robot interaction. Many of these prototypes include speech recognition and generation.

This talk will provide an overview of COLLAGEN, its applications, and the theory underlying it. In terms of applications, we will focus on DiamondHelp, a new type of collaborative interface for networked home appliances, which addresses the increasing difficulty ordinary people have in using the advanced features of digitally-operated household devices, such as programmable thermostats, home entertainment systems, etc.

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Speaker's Bio

Dr. Rich is a Distinguished Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Cambridge, Mass. The thread connecting all of Dr. Rich’s research has been to make interacting with a computer more like interacting with a person. As a founder and director of the Programmer’s project at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. in the 1980s, he pioneered research on intelligent assistants for software engineering. Dr. Rich joined MERL in 1991 as a founding member of the Research Lab. For the past several years, he has been working on a technology, called Collagen, for building collaborative interface agents based on human discourse theory. Dr. Rich is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Fellow and past Councilor of the American Assoc. for Artificial Intelligence. He was Chair of the 1992 Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Co-Chair of the 1998 National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, and Program Co-Chair the 2004 Int. Conf. on Intelligent User Interfaces. Dr. Rich received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.

Host
Brad Myers