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Interaction Challenges for Intelligent Assistants: Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium

Yorke-Smith, N. (ed). Interaction Challenges for Intelligent Assistants: Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium. AAAI Technical Report SS-07-04, March 2007. AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA.

Abstract: In an increasingly complex world, a new wave of intelligent artificial assistants have the potential to simplify and amplify our everyday personal and professional lives. These assistants will help us in mundane tasks from purchasing groceries to organizing meetings; in background tasks from providing reminders to monitoring our health; and in complex, open-ended tasks from writing a report to locating survivors in a collapsed building. Some will offer tutelage or provide recommendations. Whether robotic embodiments or software processes, these assistive agents will help us manage our time, budgets, knowledge, and workflow as they assist us in our houses, offices, cars, and public spaces.

An essential aspect of the success of our intelligent assistants is their interaction with us and with other humans and agents in natural ways that are no more obtrusive than necessary. Moreover, this interaction must be uniform and coherent over the various functions of the assistant, and be sensitive to the user's available time and cognitive focus, the interaction conditions and modalities, and subjective factors such as the user's mood.

This symposium brought together practitioners and researchers of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, robotics, assistive and agent technologies, and fields that address complex socio-technical systems. The symposium identified critical issues raised by interaction with personal assistants, the specific challenges faced, and the current state of the art. The ultimate goal is to progress towards the most useful paradigms, methodologies, and implementations for human interaction with intelligent artificial assistants.

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