Co-Designing Agents

Contents

In this paper we sketch a new approach for agent design and operability called co-designing agents (CDA). As a working definition, we take a CDA to be an agent that participates in some aspect of its own design. The precise manner and degree of a CDA's participation will ultimately be a design-time decision, but by considering a specific agent implementation (that of AI actor-agents in a virtual drama) we are able to extract a general set of CDA requirements. The CDA approach utilizes concepts from several areas of active research in AI. We present a broad summary of the relevant literature and discuss its applicability to CDA design. We then consider the SNePS knowledge representation, reasoning, and acting system as a potential CDA implementation platform.