Host: Juan Carlos Cubero Putting Plans to Use - Intelligent Systems for Planning, Execution and Collaboration ----------------------- Talk Outline Planning - Key task - List of important and varied applications - HTN framework as an integrator - List of planning techniques Execution - USE of plans - example DS1 Collaboration - plans to aid comms and collab. Pointer to the Future - Web + Social Networking + Agents + Plans + Virtual Worlds ----------------------- Prof. Austin Tate Director, AIAI, University of Edinburgh Professor of Knowledge-Based Systems, University of Edinburgh Coordinator, Virtual University of Edinburgh Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board Member, IEEE Intelligent Systems Putting Plans to Use - Intelligent Systems for Planning, Execution and Collaboration 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. We will start by exploring a few applications where AI planning technology is in regular and productive use. A successful paradigm for real planning applications has been to use a framework of hierarchical task network (TN) planning into which a number of other more specialised and search and constraint management methods are added. A lot of academic research to date has been very narrowly focused and does not attempt a broader integration of a range of separately successful methods. We will rapidly review the breadth and openness to new exploration of this exciting field. But planning is only useful if plans are successfully executed. This is tricky. The world is very messy when you try to model, predict, plan and interact with it. We will explore an application of AI planning that executed in deep space far far away from immediate human assistance. Was it successful? We will see. Planning in a careful modelled domain where things are quite predicable is one thing, but the real world of planning involves a wide range of agents, humans, disparate teams from widely differing background and cultures, robots that interact with physical complex environment, and computer and communications systems that do not always work in an ideal way. 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. ---------------- 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