Harry B. Funk

A Computational Approach to Etiquette: Operationalizing Brown and Levinson's Politeness Model

A central source of cultural differences is the communication of politeness, which can powerfully affect perception and behavior. Our computational adaptation of a universal theory of human politeness (from Brown and Levinson, 1987) combines culture-specific aspects of social context to generate expectations, score, interpret and recommend polite and impolite behaviors. Tests show this approach could reduce software development costs and increase an intelligent agents behavior repertoire through the incorporation of modular, cross-cultural etiquette libraries.

The Playbook™ Approach to Adaptive Automation

SIFT has pioneered a human-automation integration architecture, called Playbook™, based on a shared model of the tasks in the domain. This shared task model provides a means of human-automation communication about plans, goals, methods and resource usage—a process akin to referencing plays in a sports teams playbook. The Playbook enables human operators to interact with subordinate systems with the same flexibility as with well-trained human subordinates, thus allowing for adaptive automation. We describe this approach and its application in an ongoing project called Playbook-enhanced Variable Autonomy Control System™ (P-VACS).

VEHICLE CONDITION MONITORING FOR THE AUTOMATED HIGHWAY SYSTEM

This paper describes a system for monitoring the effectiveness of a vehicle in terms of capability to enter and operate in an Automated Highway System (AHS). The system possesses fault monitoring capabilities, enabling a vehicle to be a viable component of an AHS. A simulated steering system is shown to have an impact on the highway design, controller, and drivers role as part of the fault detection and reconfiguration process.