Hosting activities: experience with and future directions for a robot agent host

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses hosting activities. Hosting activities are a general class of collaborative activity in which an agent provides guidance in the form of information, entertainment, education or other services in the user's environment (which may be an artificial or the natural world) and may also request that the human user undertake actions to support the fulfillment of those services. This paper reports on experience in building a robot agent for hosting activities, both the architecture and applications being used. The paper then turns to a range of issues to be addressed in creating hosting agents, especially robotic ones. The issues include the tasks and capabilities needed for hosting agents, and social relations, especially human trust of agent hosts. Lastly the paper proposes a new evaluation metric for hosting agents.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
            Subjects: Intelligent agents

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.8 Metrics
          Subjects: Performance measures

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.9 Robotics
          Subjects: Commercial robots and applications

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
artificial intelligence, collaboration, collaborative interface agents, discourse, embodied agents, hosting agents, intelligent user interfaces, robotics