Autonomous Agents for Interactive Media

Dr Charles Rich
Distinguished Research Scientist
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

Friday, March 30, 2007
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

The main attraction of modern multi-user interactive media is obviously the people. However, an increasingly vital aspect of such environments is the autonomous agents who inhabit them---from battle monsters, to characters in a mystery story, to the waiters in a French restaurant with whom to practice your French. The techniques used today to implement such agents are mostly ad hoc. This talk will focus on a general purpose engine for building autonomous agents, called COLLAGEN (for COLLaborative AGENt), which is, in contrast, well grounded in the theory of human collaboration and conversation. I will also show some entertaining historical videos of Diamond Park, a pioneering distributed, multi-user interactive environment exhibited at COMDEX in 1995, and discuss why you have never heard of it.

______

The thread connecting all of Dr. Rich's research has been to make interacting with a computer more like interacting with a person. As a founder and director of the Programmer's Apprentice project at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. in the 1980s, he pioneered research on intelligent assistants for software engineering. Dr. Rich joined MERL in 1991 as a founding member of the Research Lab. For the past several years, he has been working on a technology, called Collagen, for building collaborative interface agents based on human discourse theory. Dr. Rich is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Fellow and past Councilor of the American Assoc. for Artificial Intelligence. He was Chair of the 1992 Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Co-Chair of the 1998 National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, and Program Co-Chair the 2004 Int. Conf. on Intelligent User Interfaces.

Host: Michael Gennert

Refreshments will be served.