Didier Rene Guzzoni

Active: A Unified Platform for Building Intelligent Web Interaction Assistants

Computer systems keep growing in complexity, processing power and Web connectivity. To leverage this rich environment and to better assist users, a new type of intelligent assistant software is required. Building intelligent assistants is a difficult task that requires expertise in many AI and engineering related fields. We believe that providing a unified tool and a set of associated methodologies to create end-to-end intelligent software will bring many benefits to this area of research. Our solution, the Active framework, introduces the original concept of active ontologies to model and implement intelligent applications in a single and coherent software environment. As an example, this paper illustrates how Active has been used to create an intelligent assistant to help mobile users retrieve online information using a multimodal dialog approach

Many Robots Make Short Work: Report of the SRI International Mobile Robot Team

Indoor mobile robots are becoming reliable enough in navigation tasks to consider working with teams of robots. Using SRI Internationals open-agent architecture (OAA) and SAPHIRA robot-control system, we configured three physical robots and a set of software agents on the internet to plan and act in coordination. Users communicate with the robots using a variety of multimodal input: pen, voice, and keyboard. The robust capabilities of the OAA and SAPHIRA enabled us to design and implement a winning team in the six weeks before the Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition.