Interaction%20Challenges%20for%20Intelligent%20Assistants

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Interaction Challenges for Intelligent Assistants

• Jim Blythe
• USC Information Sciences Institute

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• How to build truly useful assistants?
• Personalized, Learn, Engender trust,
• Become partners
• Organizer Neil Yorke-Smith
• Committee Pauline Berry, Timothy Bickmore, Mihai
  Boicu, Justine Cassell, Ed Chi, Mike Cox, John
  Gersh, Jihie Kim, Jay Modi, Donald Patterson,
  Debra Schreckenghost, Richard Simpson, Stephen
  Smith, Sashank Varma
• 28 accepted papers

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Topics

• Trust
• When to assist?
• Learning
• Modeling
• Desktop assistants
• Panel with symp. on multidisciplinary
  collaboration for socially assistive robots
• Panel with intentions in intelligent systems

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How To Make Users Happy

• And avoid annoying users
• - Brad Myers invited talk

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User Happiness?

• Hu f (Performance)

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User Happiness?
Hu f (Performance, Trust)
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User Happiness!
Hu f (EAssistant ENegative EPositive EValue
EUser ECorrected EBy-hand ECost EAvoided
EApparentness ECorrect-difficulty ESensible
WQuality WCommitment TBy-hand TBy-Hand-start-up
TBy-Hand-per-unit TAssistant TTraining-start-up
TAssistant-per-unit TInteraction-per-unit
TMonitoring TCorrecting TResponsiveness
TSystem-Training TUser-training
TAverage-for-each-correction AError-rate Nunits
PPleasantness UPerceive UWhy UProvenance
UPredictability IAssistant-interfere
IScreen-space ICognitive IAppropriate-Time
CAutonomy CCorrecting SSensible-Actions
SUser-models SLearningRSocial-Presence DHand
VImportance)
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A Tale of Two Associates

• Pilots Associate (1985-1991)
• Single Pilot
• Direct pilot interaction with associate meant
  added workload
• Design philosophy minimized direct pilot
  interaction with associate
• Moderate user acceptance

• Rotorcraft Pilots Associate (1994-1999)
• Two Pilots
• 1/3 of human activity is crew coordination
• Design philosophy included some direct pilot
  interaction with associate
• Improved User Acceptance

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Why and how to model multi-modal interaction for
a mobile robot companion

• Shuyin Li Britta Wrede Best paper
• Tested policies with users interacting with a
  robot
• Communicate pre-interaction attention
• Need to make social remarks with non-verbal
  methods (because people tend to reply in kind)

Biron and Barthoc
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Interaction Challenges for Agents with Common
Sense

• Invited talk from Henry Lieberman
• We now have several sources of common sense
  knowledge, e.g. Cyc, Open Mind, ThoughtTreasure
• Some strategies and examples of exploiting common
  sense to build better interfaces

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Strategies for using common sense in interfaces

• Find underconstrained situations
• Find situations where every little helps
• Know a little about everything, but not too much
  about anything
• Make better mistakes! Not just right and
  wrong, being reasonable is better
• Plausible mistakes can increase trust
• Set user expectations

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Examples of interfaces using common sense

• ARIA photo agent more powerful matching of tags
  using common sense
• Predictive typing
• Im having landlord problems because my
  roommate was late with my r..
• BEAM
• (Gil Chklovski)

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Trust

• Openness and understanding more important
• as systems become more complex.
• Methods to improve understanding explanations
  McGuinness et al.
• HTN metamodel Wallace
• Patterson would I trust a fork? a bridge? a
  space shuttle?
• predictability, understandability, similarity,
  liability, social/emotional

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Learning (and Trust)

• Adaptive (Learning) vs Adaptable (Instructed by
  user)
• important for believability and trust

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Supporting interaction in Robocare intelligent
assistant agent
Cesta et al. Best application paper
Use of multiagent technology

• Endowed with human like I/O channels by
  engineering state of the art components
• Face Lucia (Piero Cosi, ISTC, Pd)
• Voice Sonic (Univ.Colorado)
• Simple Interaction Manager

Robust continuous behavior at home with person
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Multiple Intelligent Systems
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Supporting interaction in Robocare intelligent
assistant agent

• Integrates multiple systems to produce a socially
  acceptable robotic care assistant
• Interesting DCOP solution to allow multiple
  systems and guarantee coherent behaviour
• System follows a STN to notice deviations from
  expected behaviour

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• Experiments in face/no-face in RoboCare
• People prefer no-face
• less artificial, more integrated in the
  domestic environment

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Desktop assistants

• Many papers on desktop assistants
• 6 from the Calo project

PeXA architecture
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Towel todo manager

• Towel Conley et al taking an IM approach to
  give access to tasks

Inspired by Diamond Help Rich et al. 06
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Did Ken sacrifice himself to User Testing?

• Registered to give talk at AAAI Spring symposium

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Should Ken have worked on meeting scheduling?

• Registered to give talk at AAAI Spring symposium
• Booked another trip in same week

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Should Ken have worked on meeting scheduling?

• Registered to give talk at AAAI Spring symposium
• Booked trip to Hawaii in same week
• Ultimate in user testing? You decide..