Online Paper: Franklin-Agents01
The Intelligent Classroom: Providing Competent Assistance
David Franklin and Kristian Hammond
In the software industry, designers are forever trying to "improve"
their products by adding ever more features to them, producing
bloated software systems that are capable of doing just about
anything. However, these systems often make it increasingly
difficult for their users to perform their tasks as they are forced
to wade through a mess of unwanted features to find the few that they
actually need. We believe that a fruitful area of research is in
building intelligent systems for particular tasks and then having the
systems actively try to assist their users in performing these tasks.
Such a system knows the plans (and the problems associated with those
plans) that their users are likely to pursue. These competent
assistants can use their expertise on their particular tasks to
guide their users through their tasks, provide better help, or
perhaps even volunteer to take over some part of the task. Such an
assistive agent is able to helpful because, through its task
knowledge, it is able to limit what it needs to consider in
cooperating with its user. In this paper we look at the
implementation of a competent assistant that functions in a physical
domain. The Intelligent Classroom is a prototype automated lecture
facility that serves as its own audio/visual assistant. We focus on
the representations and algorithms to use task knowledge to produce
cooperative behavior, arguing these techniques could easily to be
extended for use in a wide range of domains (i.e. both physical and
purely electronic domains).
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