Susanne Biundo

A companion technology for cognitive technical systems

The Transregional Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR 62 A Companion Technology for Cognitive Technical Systems, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at Ulm and Magdeburg sites, deals with the systematic and interdisciplinary study of cognitive abilities and their implementation in technical systems. The properties of multimodality, individuality, adaptability, availability, cooperativeness and trustworthiness are at the focus of the investigation. These characteristics show a new type of interactive device which is not only practical and efficient to operate, but as well agreeable, hence the term companion. The realisation of such a technology is supported by technical advancement as well as by neurobiological findings. Companion technology has to consider the entire situation of the user, machine, environment and (if applicable) other people or third interacting parties, in current and historical states. This will reflect the mental state of the user, his embeddedness in the task, and how he is situated in the current process.

Companion-Technology for Cognitive Technical Systems

We introduce the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre “Companion-Technology for Cognitive Technical Systems”—a cross-disciplinary endeavor towards the development of an enabling technology for Companion-systems. These systems completely adjust their functionality and service to the individual user. They comply with his or her capabilities, preferences, requirements, and current needs and adapt to the individual’s emotional state and ambient conditions. Companion-like behavior of technical systems is achieved through the investigation and implementation of cognitive abilities and their well-orchestrated interplay.

KI 2004: Advances in Artificial Intelligence

The year 2004 marks the fiftieth birthday of the first computer generated proof of a mathematical theorem: “the sum of two even numbers is again an even number” (with Martin Davis’ implementation of Presburger Arithmetic in 1954). While Martin Davis and later the research community of automated deduction used machine oriented calculi to find the proof for a theorem by automatic means, the Automath project of N.G. de Bruijn – more modest in its aims with respect to automation – showed in the late 1960s and early 70s that a complete mathematical textbook could be coded and proof-checked by a computer. Classical theorem proving procedures of today are based on ingenious search techniques to find a proof for a given theorem in very large search spaces – often in the range of several billion clauses. But in spite of many successful attempts to prove even open mathematical problems automatically, their use in everyday mathematical practice is still limited. The shift from search based methods to more abstract planning techniques however opened up a new paradigm for mathematical reasoning on a computer and several systems of the new kind now employ a mix of interactive, search based as well as proof planning techniques. The Ωmega system is at the core of several related and well-integrated research projects of the Ωmega research group, whose aim is to develop system support for the working mathematician, in particular it supports proof development at a human oriented level of abstraction. It is a modular system with a central proof data structure and several supplementary subsystems including automated deduction and computer algebra systems. Ωmega has many characteristics in common with systems like NuPrL [ACE00], CoQ [Coq03], Hol [GM93], Pvs [ORR96], and Isabelle [Pau94,NPW02]. However, it differs from these systems with respect to its focus on proof planning and in that respect it is more similar to the proof planning systems Clam and λClam at Edinburgh [RSG98,BvHHS90]. 1 http://www.win.tue.nl/automath/ S. Biundo, T. Frühwirth, and G. Palm (Eds.): KI 2004, LNAI 3238, pp. 3–28, 2004. c

Advanced user assistance based on AI planning

Artificial Intelligence technologies enable the implementation of cognitive systems with advanced planning and reasoning capabilities. This article presents an approach to use hybrid planning - a method that combines reasoning about procedural knowledge and causalities - to provide user-centered assistance. Based on a completely declarative description of actions, tasks, and solution methods, hybrid planning allows for the generation of knowledge-rich plans of action. The information those plans comprise includes causal dependencies between actions on both abstract and primitive levels as well as information about their hierarchical and temporal relationships. We present the hybrid planning approach in detail and show its potential by describing the realization of various assistance functionalities based on complex cognitive processes like the generation, repair, and explanation of plans. Advanced user assistance is demonstrated by means of a practical application scenario where an innovative electronic support mechanism helps a user to operate a complex mobile communication device.

Deductive planning and plan reuse in a command language environment

In this paper we introduce a deductive planning system currently being developed as the kernel of an intelligent help system. It consists of a deductive planner and a plan reuse component and with that provides planning from first as well as planning from second principles. Both components rely upon an interval-based temporal logic. The deductive formalisms realizing plan formation from formal specifications and the reuse of already existing plans respectively are presented and demonstrated by examples taken from an operating systems domain.

Companion-Technology: Towards User- and Situation-Adaptive Functionality of Technical Systems

The properties of multimodality, individuality, adaptability, availability, cooperativeness and trustworthiness are at the focus of the investigation of Companion Systems. In this article, we describe the involved key components of such a system and the way they interact with each other. Along with the article comes a video, in which we demonstrate a fully functional prototypical implementation and explain the involved scientific contributions in a simplified manner. The realized technology considers the entire situation of the user and the environment in current and past states. The gained knowledge reflects the context of use and serves as basis for decision-making in the presented adaptive system.

Hybrid planning using flexible strategies

In this paper we present a highly modular planning system architecture. It is based on a proper formal account of hybrid planning, which allows for the formal definition of (flexible) planning strategies. Groups of modules for flaw detection and plan refinement provide the basic functionalities of a planning system. The concept of explicit strategy modules serves to formulate and implement strategies that orchestrate the basic modules. This way a variety of fixed plan generation procedures as well as novel flexible planning strategies can easily be implemented and evaluated. We present a number of such strategies and show some first comparative performance results.

Fusion paradigms in cognitive technical systems for human-computer interaction

Recent trends in human-computer interaction (HCI) show a development towards cognitive technical systems (CTS) to provide natural and efficient operating principles. To do so, a CTS has to rely on data from multiple sensors which must be processed and combined by fusion algorithms. Furthermore, additional sources of knowledge have to be integrated, to put the observations made into the correct context. Research in this field often focuses on optimizing the performance of the individual algorithms, rather than reflecting the requirements of CTS. This paper presents the information fusion principles in CTS architectures we developed for Companion Technologies. Combination of information generally goes along with the level of abstractness, time granularity and robustness, such that large CTS architectures must perform fusion gradually on different levels - starting from sensor-based recognitions to highly abstract logical inferences. In our CTS application we sectioned information fusion approaches into three categories: perception-level fusion, knowledge-based fusion and application-level fusion. For each category, we introduce examples of characteristic algorithms. In addition, we provide a detailed protocol on the implementation performed in order to study the interplay of the developed algorithms.

Von kognitiven technischen Systemen zu Companion-Systemen

ZusammenfassungDer Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio 62 „Eine Companion-Technologie für kognitive technische Systeme“ befasst sich mit der systematischen und interdisziplinären Erforschung kognitiver Fähigkeiten und deren Realisierung in technischen Systemen. Dabei stehen die Eigenschaften der Individualität, Anpassungsfähigkeit, Verfügbarkeit, Kooperativität und Vertrauenswürdigkeit im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung. Die Realisierung dieser so-genannten Companion-Eigenschaften soll menschlichen Nutzern eine neue – auch emotionale – Dimension des Umgangs mit interaktiven Systemen erschließen, wobei diese als empathische Assistenten wahrgenommen und akzeptiert werden.

Plan Repair in Hybrid Planning

We present a domain-independent approach to plan repair in a formal framework for hybrid planning. It exploits the generation process of the failed plan by retracting decisions that led to the failed plan fragments. They are selectively replaced by suitable alternatives, and the repaired plan is completed by following the previous generation process as close as possible. This way, a stable solution is obtained, i.e. a repair of the failed plan that causes minimal perturbation.