Luigi and other agents, or, How agents can assist collaboration

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Luigi and other agents, or,How agents can
assist collaboration

• Stuart WattKnowledge Media InstituteThe Open
  University, Milton Keynes, UKS.N.K.Watt_at_open.ac.
  uk

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Overview of the presentation

• Questions to ask and answer
• how can we use programs that are getting
  increasining complicated?
• how can we design programs that are powerful and
  still simple?
• what can we do to make cooperation work?
• how can we design systems to overcome the
  problems of cooperation?
• Agents a possible answer
• agents to help people to solve problems
• agents to help people collaborate

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Planning a meeting
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Agents a new kind of medium

• Agents have two possible roles
• mediating between a person and a program
• mediating between people collaborating
• The distinction between these may be blurred
• to participants in interaction, it may not always
  be obvious what they are interacting with
• mailing lists
• Heterogeneous groupware

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agent. 4. a. Of persons

• One who does the actual work of anything, as
  distinguished from the instigator or employer
  hence, one who acts for another, a deputy,
  steward, factor, substitute, representative, or
  emissary.
• Oxford English Dictionary
• The definition makes it clear an agent acts for
  someone, so there is more to agency than action.
  There has to be someone or something (frequently
  an organisation) that delegates responsibility
  for that action.
• This is the aspect of agency that has
  traditionally been ignored by artificial
  intelligence. It has, though, at least in part,
  been a focus of study in human-computer
  interaction.

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What should an agent look like?

• Agents can be
• defined by their internal behaviour
• defined by their external behaviour
• Agents at the edge of interface protocol
• anthropomorphism
• Phil, Bob
• virtual person
• People get frustrated with a dip in a bow tie

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An anthropomorphic agent
An agent acting in its environment?
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Towards heterogeneous groupware

• Groupware is defined as computer-based systems
  that support groups of people engaged in a common
  task (or goal) and that provide an interface to a
  shared environment
• Typical examples shared text editors, group
  decision support tools
• Alternatively, people can be doing different
  jobs their roles may conflict
• Typical example concurrent engineering
• The problem What then is the common goal?
• Perhaps there isnt one!

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Multiple role groupware

• No common goal
• If people are in the same role, it is single role
  groupware
• Examples include email, Colab
• If people are in different roles, it is multiple
  role groupware
• Examples include many shared databases, CASE
  tools, Vital
• Differences in individual roles lead to conflict
• Examples include
• planning meetings
• collaborative learning

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Heterogeneous groupware

• Multiple role groupware
• Participants are a free mixture of people and
  agents
• symmetric interaction between humans
• asymmetric interaction between humans and agents
• Agents need to interact on human terms, not their
  own
• Interaction forms led by humans
• Agents recognition of human beliefs
• If a system enforces the differences in roles it
  is biased. This means people in some roles get
  disproportionately more benefit than the others

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Cooperation and conflict

• To recognise potential conflict and bias a model
  is needed
• Consider each potential conflict as a
  non-zero-sum game

Player 2
Cooperate
Defect
This table is an example payoff table. Note it is
symmetric, and this shows the conflict isnt
biased Asymmetry in the payoff table is an
indication of bias
3 3
5 0
Cooperate
Player 1
0 5
1 1
Defect
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Conflict and cooperation

• If the table is asymmetric the conflict is biased
• In this case, the Timesheet Dilemma, there is
  no point in the subordinate cooperating

Player 2
Cooperate
Defect
The conflict can be overcome by either Reducing
the cost of collaboration Increasing the benefit
of collaboration
5 -1
-5 -1
Cooperate
Player 1
5 0
-5 0
Defect
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Problems with meeting management systems

• The weakest link in the chain phenomenon
• role conflict
• The diary dilemma
• People with many meetings use the system
• People with few meetings dont
• The solution
• reduce the burden so people with few meetings
  dont need to use any special computers or
  programs
• Luigi

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Luigi and the least common denominator
approach

• Narrow, domain-specific assistants
• Designed to overcome role conflict
• most burden on those who can gain the most
• little or no burden on those who gain the least
• Extensive use of agents
• to mediate between people
• to take the burden from those who can gain the
  most
• to keep the burden from those who gain the least
• using electronic mail

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Luigi helping to plan meetings
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Luigi using the web to book a meeting
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Deep and surface groupware

• Groupware systems vary in the level of sharing
• Deep groupware shares application objects (like
  a database would)
• needs to be designed into a program from the
  start
• Shallow groupware shares the presentation of
  the objects
• can be added to an existing program with a
  well-tested interface
• Electronic mail is a shallow groupware system
• already augmented with agents
• mailing lists
• Luigi

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Design from role conflict

• Multiple roles teachers, students, examiners,
  and many many more
• There are very different perceptions of the
  common goal, there is no right thing for the
  designer
• Which metaphor? Desktop? Rooms? Software House?
  The metaphor itself can reinforce role conflict
• Shallow groupware allows a loose connection of a
  suite of environments

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Designing systems of interacting agents

• Many ways to decompose a system to agents
• Structural decomposition
• Organisational decomposition
• Engineers decomposition
• Criterion decomposition
• Different interaction strategies
• Example the criterion decomposition
• Agents correspond to criteria e.g. fairness,
  cost
• Agents negotiate to balance criteria
• Agents behave like characters

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Level 1 Agents as behavers

• Basic implementation of design criteria
• First-order intentional systems
• No reasoning or knowledge of others beliefs
• No model of negotiation
• Agent interaction
• simple approval or disapproval of an action
• voting to reach consensus

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Level 2 Agents as believers

• Agents which can reason about the beliefs of
  others
• n th order intentional systems
• Often described with an augmented modal logic
• Negotiation with other agents
• Agent interaction
• recognise each others beliefs
• act with respect to the beliefs of others

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Level 3 Agents as psychologists

• Agents which can derive the beliefs of others
• Negotiation with human agents
• Grand collaboration
• Agent interaction
• recognise the humans beliefs
• acts with respect to the beliefs of humans

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Future work new media

• Fax machines
• Pagers
• Telephones
• voice recognition
• tone recognition
• Personal digital assistants

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Future work personal assistants

• Delegation to son of Luigi
• Bringing back the electronic diary
• Luigi can talk directly to the diary

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Personal agentsSon of Luigi
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Future work virtual participant
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Future work new domains

• Electronic tutoring
• The virtual teaching assistant
• Automatic assignment handling
• Automatic assignment marking
• Outside teaching
• Automatic mail/fax/phone
• Electronic mail management
• The virtual assistant

Students
Tutors
Course team
Agents
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Lessons we can learn

• Groupware systems with multiple roles are very
  different to single-role systems and very
  difficult
• Agents can help to balance the benefits so
  everybody is encouraged to cooperate

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Conclusions

• Theoretical and practical benefits
• more flexible agent social structures
• more complete theories of human computer
  interaction
• giving systems the ability to recognise peoples
  mental states
• designing agents as assistants
• tools for multiple role groupware
• better collaboration between people and computers
• steps towards the grand collaboration