Invited Seminar to Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA - 8-Feb-2008 Prof. Austin Tate Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, University of Edinburgh Title: I-Room - Intelligent Collaborative Spaces for Emergency Response Keywords: Intelligent Systems, Knowledge Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Planning, Command and Control, Collaborative Systems, Emergency Response, Virtual Worlds Abstract: Our long term aim is to contribute to a future "Helpful Environment" by supporting 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. Our "I-X" platform and its "<I-N-C-A>" conceptual model provide the basis for knowledge about objectives, capabilities, tasks, activities, plans and behaviour to be shared in a mixed-initiative environment involving teams of people, computing services and robot/sensor equipment. The technology is rooted in flexible knowledge-rich artificial intelligence planning methods and has contributed to the development of standards for shared plan and process representations. The focus of the current work is on an "intelligent room" or "knowledgeable room" to act as a knowledge aid to support collaborative teleconferences and meetings initially but later to provide a knowledge assistant in any location a user wishes via whatever presentation and communications methods are appropriate. The project is a base for a range of collaborative developments, plug-ins, and projects. Initial work is focused on the creation of a Virtual Collaboration Center in a virtual world environment such as Second Life. The talk will outline our vision of the Helpful Environment and introduce the key I-X and <I-N-C-A> concepts which could offer a long term core for elements of this. It will describe a number of large scale collaborative projects in which these ideas are in use including FireGrid, CoAX, CoAKTinG and Co-OPR. It will show current work on the I-Room Virtual Collaboration Center. Biography: Home Page: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/ Project Page: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/plan/ 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.