Conditional Actions, Context Dependent Actions and Information Gathering

Extending Theories of Action: Formal Theory and Practical Applications

Volume

Papers from the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

At Honeywell Technology Center, we are applying planning technology to help humans use complex automated systems. Some example systems are suites of NASA satellite image-processing programs for EOSDIS, schedulers for batch manufacturing processes and automated support for medical treatment protocols. The problem is one of providing what Pattie Maes [8] calls "indirect interaction:" allowing users to perform intuitively meaningful, high-level actions with simple commands. Unlike Etzioni [4], we are not concerned with demonstrating fully autonomous "softbots;" our goal is to provide semi-autonomous systems that work in cooperation with their human users.