Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour AISB Quarterly - Spring 2007 - http://www.aisb.org.uk/ Austin Tate Planning and Doing Things Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute University of Edinburgh I was interested in computers by the age of 15 and gave talks on them at school. I attended evening classes a couple of years later while still at school travelling on the bus for an hour in the evening to a college in Leeds to learn programming (in COBOL!). Computers at that time filled a room, you submitted your exercises on punched card and got the results the following day. I built my first AI planner over 35 years ago. I'd already been on an early AI course at Lancaster University where the language of choice for teaching a range of topics was POP-2 and wanted to do a Summer project to create a problem solver. With support from Donald Michie and his team at Edinburgh I tried to create a Graph Traverser along the lines they were working on. Boy, am I glad I got involved with Computers, AI and planning technology! Planning is a key area for creating intelligent behaviour and a long term aim of the AI community. I have been doing my bit to advance the concepts, technology and applications we have in his area. And, in doing so, I have been able to bring in a number of my other interests in search and rescue teams (from a childhood TV programme - Supercar), space travel and future habitats. This has involved collaboration with scientists, systems developers and creative people worldwide. I love collaborative projects and the joint demonstrations of the results. I joined Donald Michie's Department of Machine Intelligence in Edinburgh in the early 1970s during which time my AI planners Interplan and Nonlin were created. I shared a flat with my fellow PhD student Dave Warren, who worked on the early Prolog compilers, using remarkably similar technology to that I was interested in for planning. I shared an office with Aaron Sloman who was visiting and thinking deep thoughts about the philosophical aspects of AI. Earl Sacerdoti, who did work on multi-level plan representation and hierarchical planning was a visitor and we worked together on concepts for flexible hierarchical, partial ordered task network planners with internal goal structure recorded. Edinburgh is a fantastic environment with many visitors and collaborators. Nonlin was created to be used on real applications with the UK electricity generation utility for turbine overhaul procedure project planning. It was also used to drive the Freddy II robot in a project led by Robin Popplestone. Its core algorithms are still at the heart of most Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) and partial-ordered (POP) planners. I had a period in the second half of the 1970s working on IBM and ICL mainframes leading a team which developed commercial data base software for engineering applications, and the team supported that for business critical applications. Just afterwards I headed up Edinburgh University's microcomputer support and office systems team, when these systems were novel and distributed computing was just starting to take off. Most computing before that was on large centralised mainframe systems. This work on software engineering and being involved in systems and user help desk support was something that has stayed with me through my career. Edinburgh University used some of the funds generated by its commercial activities, in which I was engaged, to give a number of academic entrepreneurs a fellowship to allow them to explore collaborations with industry and with international organisations. The three of us that got these fellowships explored AI (me), Computer Science (Malcolm Atkinson, now Director of the National e-Science Centre) and Electronic Engineering (Peter Denyer, who formed Vision group, a company successfully floated on the Stock Exchange). I joined Jim Howe (Head of the School of AI at Edinburgh) as he was creating the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and we obtained commercial and other funding to start this organisation. I took over as its Director after the first year of operations. AIAI has been a pioneer in using AI technology for a wide range of applications. It has concentrated on knowledge systems, planning systems, and adaptive systems. Its been involved in some pioneering and deployed influential systems in everyday use - for yellow pages layout, spacecraft assembly, integration and test, industrial plant diagnosis, logistics support and so on. My own Planning and Activity Management Group within AIAI is exploring representations and reasoning mechanisms for inter-agent activity support. The agents may be people or computer systems working in a coordinated fashion. The group explores and develops generic approaches by engaging in specific applied studies. Applications include crisis action planning, command and control, space systems, manufacturing, logistics, construction, procedural assistance, help desks, emergency response, etc. Our long term aim is the creation and use of task-centric virtual organisations involving people, government and non-governmental organisations, automated systems, grid and web services working alongside intelligent robotic, vehicle, building and environmental systems to respond to very dynamic events on scales from local to global. Over the last decade, I have concentrated on applying planning and collaboration technology to emergency response tasks, and a number of my projects contribute to this. In the UK, the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) project with 5 university groups and a number of industrial and government has pushed the research agenda for the semantic web and knowledge systems on the web and we are applying these in a challenging accident scenario situated in central London. In the US, we have had DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) support for our work since the late 1980s) and this has been directed towards multi-national coalition operations for peace-keeping, collaborative operations for disaster relief, search and rescue coordination, etc. in projects such as CoAX, CoSAR-TS and Co-OPR. In Europe, we are engaged in projects such as OpenKnowledge which has emergency response interests in dealing with the aftermath of floods in Italy. The FireGrid project, in the UK, involves a large team from academia, industry and government agencies who are exploring concepts for emergency response with advance simulation in intelligent buildings. Our aim is to create helpful agents and collaboration between organisations and people which can use knowledge of other agents, tasks, procedures, services and the environment so as create a "helpful environment" which improves safety and the lives of everyone. References AIAI Planning and Activity Management Group - http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/plan/ 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. See Austin Tate being interviewed about the use of artificial intelligence techniques and their use in emergency response centres in March 2007 - http://www.ukfuturetv.com (C) 2007, Austin Tate, AIAI, University of Edinburgh