I-Room: A Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction Prof. Austin Tate Director, AIAI, University of Edinburgh http://openvce.net/iroom http://openvce.net/helpful-environment An I-Room provides a 3D virtual space with multiple work zones, designed for collaborative and brain storming style meetings. It can be used as an operations centre. Plenty of wall and floor space is available for displays and gadgets. The I-Rooms are used in the I-X research on intelligent collaborative and task support environments at AIAI within the University of Edinburgh. The main feature of the I-Room is the active link up with external web services, collaboration systems and intelligent systems aids. Applications include: * Virtual collaboration center * Business teleconferencing * Team Meetings for projects, products or reviews * Product Help Desks * Design to Product - product lifecycle workflow support * Environmental, building and plant monitoring center * Health and safety at work, disability awareness * Intelligent tutors, guides and greeters * Active demonstration pavilions The I-Room 3D virtual space is linked to a social networking and community knowledge management web portal. Recent experimental use of the I-Room for the "Whole of Society Crises Response" (WoSCR) community in the conduct of emergency response and crisis management tasks will be described. This is intended as a contribution to the wider notions of "The Helpful Environment" which is a theme of my visit to IHMC. Biography: Home Page: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/ Project Page: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/plan/ Photo: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/img/Austin-Tate-2009-4256x2832.jpg Prof Austin Tate holds the Chair in Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Edinburgh and is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the University. He helped form AIAI in 1984 and since that time has led its efforts to transfer the technologies and methods of artificial intelligence and knowledge systems into commercial, governmental and academic applications throughout the world. He holds degrees in Computer Studies (B.A. Lancaster, 1972) and Machine Intelligence (Ph.D. Edinburgh, 1975). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland's National Academy), and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence amongst other honors. He is a professionally Chartered Engineer. Prof. Tate's research interests are in the use of rich process and plan representations along with tools that can utilize these representations to support planning and activity management. He pioneered the early, now widely used and deployed, approaches to hierarchical planning and constraint satisfaction in the Interplan, Nonlin and O-Plan planning systems. His recent work called "I-X" is more concerned with supporting collaboration between human and system agents to perform cooperative tasks. Prof. Tate was the Edinburgh PI in the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration funded by EPSRC. He also led the DARPA funded Coalition Agent eXperiment (CoAX) project involving some 30 organizations in 4 countries over a 3 year period. His work is being applied to search and rescue and emergency response tasks. He is Chief Technical Officer of I-C2 Systems, a company seeking to develop advanced aids for emergency response. His internationally sponsored research work is focused on emergency response and involves advanced knowledge and planning technologies, and collaborative systems especially using virtual worlds. He leads the Virtual University of Edinburgh, Vue, a virtual educational and research institute bringing together those interested in the use of virtual worlds for teaching, research and outreach. Prof. Tate is on the Senior Advisory Board for IEEE Intelligent Systems journal and is a member of the editorial board of a number of other journals.