Lee McCauley

MIKI: a speech enabled intelligent kiosk

We introduce MIKI, a three-dimensional, directory assistance-type digital persona displayed on a prominently-positioned 50 inch plasma unit housed at the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis. MIKI, which stands for Memphis Intelligent Kiosk Initiative, guides students, faculty and visitors through the Institute’s maze of classrooms, labs, lecture halls and offices through graphically-rich, multidimensional, interactive, touch and voice sensitive digital content. MIKI differs from other intelligent kiosk systems by its advanced natural language understanding capabilities that provide it with the ability to answer informal verbal queries without the need for rigorous phraseology. This paper describes, in general, the design, implementation, and observations of visitor reactions to the Intelligent Kiosk.

A Large-Scale Multi-Agent System for Navy Personnel Distribution

In the US Navy, at the end of each sailors tour of duty, he or she is assigned to a new job. The Navy employs some 280 people, called detailers, full time to effect these new assignments. The intelligent distribution agent (IDA) prototype was designed and built to automate, in a cognitively plausible manner, the job of the human detailers. That model is being redesigned to function as a multi-agent system. This is not a trivial matter due to the fact that there would need to be approximately 350 ‐ 000 individual agents. There are also many issues relating to how the agents interact and how all entities involved, including humans, exercise their autonomy. This paper describes both the IDA prototype and the multi-agent IDA system being created from it. We shall also discuss several of the major issues regarding the design, interaction and autonomy of the various agents involved.

A mechanism for human - robot interaction through informal voice commands

Interaction between humans and robots must, necessarily, be in a manner that is natural to humans, such as informal speech. While verbal command and control systems are fairly common, the human must know the exact phrases to issue in order for their robotic partner to respond appropriately. These systems define a few grammar rules that are used to match against incoming utterances. Here, we present a method of using these same grammar rules to expand the capabilities of command and control engines to include semantically similar utterances. Preliminary results from an experimental simulation are presented along with a detailed methodology of a recently completed study aimed at collecting human speech for a more rigorous analysis.

Interacting with IDA

This chapter describes IDA, an autonomous and “conscious” software agent, and how she interacts with humans. IDA’S purpose is to converse with sailors in the U.S. Navy using natural language in order to arrive at a job placement situation that is beneficial for the sailor and the Navy. Along the way we will explore the general notion of autonomy and what role IDA’S “consciousness” plays in extending that concept.

An emotion-based “conscious” software agent architecture

Evidence of the role of emotions in the action selection processes of environmentally situated agents continues to mount. This is no less true for autonomous software agents. Here we are concerned with such software agents that model a psychological theory of consciousness, global workspace theory. We briefly describe the architecture of two such agents, CMattie and IDA, and the role emotions play in each. Both agents communicate with humans in natural language, the first about seminars and the like, the second about job possibilities. IDA must also deliberate on various scenarios and negotiate with humans. In CMattie emotions occur in response to incoming stimuli from the environment and affect behavior indirectly by strengthening or weakening drives. In IDA the emotions are integrated with the consciousness mechanism, and bidirectionally connected with all the major parts of the architecture. Thus, emotions will affect, and be affected by, essentially all of the agents disparate cognitive processes. They will thus play a role in essentially all cognitive activity including perception, memory, consciousness, action selection, learning, and metacognition. These emotional connections will provide a common currency among the several modules of the agent architecture. These connections will also allow for the learning of complex emotions. The emotions serve to tell the agent how well its doing.

RFID Tag Characterization in a GHz Transverse Electromagnetic Cell

This paper presents results from a study that attempted to characterize the performance of RFID tags in a GHz Transverse Electromagnetic (GTEM) cell in which an approximately constant electro magnetic (EM) field potentially free of any extraneous interference was maintained. Performance of four commercially available RFID tags manufactured by different vendors was characterized on the basis of horizontal directivity, vertical directivity, sensitivity, and frequency characteristics.

Understanding without formality: augmenting speech recognition to understand informal verbal commands

Verbal command and control systems are fairly common; almost all off-the-shelf speech recognition packages come with a way to perform various tasks through a voice command. Unfortunately, these systems require that the user utter the commands precisely in the format that it is expecting. These systems have a small number of grammar rules defined that are used to match against incoming utterances. Here, we present a method of using these same grammar rules to expand the capabilities of command and control engines to include semantically similar utterances. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is used to connect specific grammar rules with the meanings underlying matching phrases resulting in utterances being matched to grammar rules even though the exact phrase did not match any specific rule. Experiments are described that determine the extent to which this method can be used and how accurate it is.

MIKI: A Case Study of an Intelligent Kiosk and Its Usability

MIKI is a three-dimensional directory assistance-type digital persona displayed on a prominently-positioned 50 inch plasma unit housed at the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis. MIKI, which stands for Memphis Intelligent Kiosk Initiative, guides students, faculty and visitors through the Institute’s maze of classrooms, labs, lecture halls and offices through graphically-rich, multidimensional, interactive, touch and voice sensitive digital content. MIKI differs from other intelligent kiosk systems by its advanced natural language understanding capabilities that provide it with the ability to answer informal verbal queries without the need for rigorous phraseology. This chapter first describes, in general, the design and implementation of the Intelligent Kiosk. We then describe a usability study conducted to evaluate the functionality of the system. While the usability testing exemplified good interface design in a number of areas, the complexity of multiple modalities—including animated graphics, speech technology and an avatar greeter—complicated usability testing, leaving developers seeking improved instruments. In particular, factors such as gender and technical background of the user seemed to change the way that various kiosk tasks were perceived, deficiencies were observed in speech interaction as well as the location information in a 3D animated map.