Putting Plans to Real Use -
Intelligent Systems for Planning, Execution and Collaboration

Prof. Austin Tate
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Description

Planning is a key task of importance to governments and organisations
of all kinds, and to us all on a personal, family and business
level. It is one of the most studied areas in Artificial Intelligence
and one that demands many aspects and approaches. It has vital and
important applications in a wide variety of areas. Planning is
only useful if plans are successfully put into real use - i.e. they
are executed. This is tricky. But plans can be used to assist in
communication and collaboration, including in some of the most dynamic
and challenging applications such as international emergency response.

Lets look forward to a future "Helpful Environment" aided by AI
planning and knowledge-based technologies - a future in which
ubiquitous computing, sensor grids and networked systems combine to
help the individuals, families, businesses, organizations, the public
at large, regions and countries to be self supportive and mutually
helpful with specialised resources for their daily lives, for help and
assistance in emergencies.  This will demand a new generation of
researchers and entrepreneurs able to combine the next generation
Internet, semantic web, social networking, agent-based technologies,
intelligent planning systems and virtual environments into a new
approach.  It will be quite a journey.

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Talk Outline

Planning  - Key task
          - List of important and varied applications
          - HTN framework as an integrator
          - List of planning techniques

Execution - USE of plans

Collaboration - Plans to aid communications and collaboration

Pointer to the Future
          - Social Web + Agents + Plans + Virtual Worlds

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Reading

O-Plan and its Applications

Tate, A. and Dalton, J. (2003) O-Plan: a Common Lisp Planning Web
Service, invited paper, in Proceedings of the International Lisp
Conference 2003, October 12-25, 2003, New York, NY, USA, October
12-15, 2003.

http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2000/2000-sges-tate-intelligible-planning.pdf

I-X/I-Plan and its Integration Approach

Tate, A. (2000) Intelligible AI Planning, in Research and Development
in Intelligent Systems XVII, Proceedings of ES2000, The Twentieth
British Computer Society Special Group on Expert Systems International
Conference on Knowledge Based Systems and Applied Artificial
Intelligence, pp. 3-16, Cambridge, UK, December 2000, Springer.

http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2003/2003-luc-tate-oplan-web.pdf

I-Rooms

Tate, A. (2010) I-Room: Integrating Intelligent Agents and Virtual
Worlds, X10 Workshop on Extensible Virtual Worlds
(http://vw.ddns.uark.edu/X10). Organized by the IBM Academy of
Technology and the University of Arkansas. Second Life, March 29-30,
2010.

http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2010/2010-xvw-tate-iroom.pdf

Helpful Environment

Tate, A. (2006) The Helpful Environment: Geographically Dispersed
Intelligent Agents That Collaborate, Special Issue on "The Future of
AI", IEEE Intelligent Systems, May-June 2006, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp
57-61. IEEE Computer Society.

http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2006/2006-ieee-is-tate-helpful-env-as-published.pdf