ylfink@water.waterloo.edu (ylfink) (01/18/89)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO SEMINAR ACTIVITIES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR - Friday, January 20, 1989 Mr. Brad Goodman, BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts, will speak on ``Plan Recognition for Intelligent Interfaces''. TIME: 1:30 PM ROOM: DC 1304 ABSTRACT Plan recognition is an active research area in automatic reasoning, as well as a promising approach to engineering better interfaces in a wide variety of application areas. However, exactly what kind of tasks plan recognition can be used to support, and how such tasks in turn constrain plan recognition algorithms, are questions that have typically remained unexamined. In this talk I will describe joint research conducted with Diane J. Litman of AT&T Bell Laboratories that provides a concrete exploration of these issues. I will show how plan recognition can be used to support several classes of interface tasks (advice generation, task completion, context-sensitive responses, error detection and recovery), and how such tasks in turn provide representation and reasoning constraints that must be satisfied in order for the plan recognizer to efficiently (if at all) support these tasks. I then will describe how interfaces are fundamentally limited by current plan recognition approaches, and use these limitations to identify and motivate our current research towards a new generation of plan recognition systems. Our research is developed in the context of CHECS (Chemical Engineering Cad System), a plan-based interface system for computer aided design.