"From the Programmer's Apprentice to Human-Robot Interaction: 30 Years of Research on Human-Computer Collaboration [Part 1 of 2]"

Charles Rich, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

I will begin by reprising a presentation that Candy Sidner and I gave at AAAI-06 summarizing the continuous thread of research on human-computer collaboration we have conducted over the past thirty years. The thread starts with the Programmer's Apprentice project, continues with the development of SharedPlan discourse theory and its implementation in Collagen, and most recently includes task-based user interfaces and human-robot interaction. Our research reflects many important AI themes and issues over this period, such as knowledge representation and reasoning, planning and intent recognition, learning, and the interplay of human theory and computer engineering.

I will conclude by describing in detail our recent work on DiamondHelp, a generic task guidance system, including a live demonstration.

In Part 2, on Thursday, Feb 7th, Candy Sidner (BAE Systems AIT) will describe our recent work on engagement and collaboration in human-robot interaction.