L.J. Groups of Collaborating Users and Agents in Ambient Intelligent Environments

Groups of Collaborating Users and Agents in Ambient Intelligent Environments

Jan M.V. Misker, Cor J. Veenman, Leon J.M. Rothkrantz

Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,

Man Machine Interaction group

{j.m.v.misker,c.j.veenman,l.j.m.rothkrantz@ewi.tudelft.nl}

Abstract

An ad hoc agent environment is

a way for users to interact with an ambient intelligent environment.Agents are as s ociated with every device, s ervice or content. The user interacts with his environment as a whole, in s tead of interacting with individual applications on individual devices . Devices and services in the environment have to be more or less independent, which fits well with the notion that agents are autonomous. A res earch application that demonstrates some of the user agent interaction issues involved when employing agents has been developed. It shows the tension between the user being in control and the autonomy of agent s . The notion of cooperating groups is introduced as a way for users to gain control over which agents collaborate. Users can then es tablis h connections between devices and content that are meaningful to them, in the context of their task.

1 Introduction

This research is about user interaction in an interactive, dynamic environment. The high level topic of interest to us is how a user interacts with such an environment as a whole. As a first step to make this question more tangible, we propose the use of agents as an intermediary level between the user interaction and the technical properties of the environment. Using agents provides a means of modeling the various information flows and interactions with the user and within the environment. Furthermore, when we look at the user interaction from an agent perspective, we can,by adding knowledge about the system, reformulate some of the technical properties into interaction issues,for example discovery can be related to navigation.The environment has a wireless, ad hoc network as the underlying infrastructure. Nodes have continuously changing connections with other nodes and information can be routed to nodes outside the direct radio range.

We are building running prototypes that 1)demonstrate aspects of the concepts and issues involved in user environment interaction and 2) can be used to do user tests. The prototypes are built with the FIPA [5] compliant JADE [2] platform running on PDAs.

Our working definition of an agent is adopted from [9]: an agent is an artificial, computational entity that can perform certain tasks with a certain degree of autonomy or initiative whilst intelligently adapting to its environment. Note that a human is not an agent in this definition.

Abowd et. al. [1] provide an excellent overview of user interaction in a UbiComp environment, showing the need for a more complete understanding of the way users perform tasks and activities. User interaction with agents provides several hooks that can relate technical properties to user interaction: a) agent autonomy, b) timing and deadlines, c) availability and discovery and d) agent identity.

2 Ad Hoc Agent Environment

In an ad hoc agent environment every device and/or service is modeled as one or more agents. This implies that not only the devices in the connected environment have an agent representing them, but also the devices and services that are associated with the user or more general services on a global scale like Internet web services.

The agent environment is ad hoc, meaning that connections between agents are made at run-time.There can be no centralized agents regarding naming and addressing of agents, but of course there has to be local infrastructure for this. There will also be a certain amount of common knowledge that the agents need in order to communicate about relevant topics, e.g. a message passing framework and ontologies.

Previous work [3][6] on ad hoc agent systems focused mainly on defining small footprint agent platforms, we research the user interaction issues.

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2.1Agent Groups

Within the agent environment there can be groups of agents that cooperate and/or share a purpose, for example: a) an information providing agent and a display agent, b) the personal agents of a group of users or c) a set of agents that represent one user’s personal devices. Within a group agents can communicate based on the role they perform in the group. It is expected that the notion of a group can help users gain a better grip on their interactive environment by allowing them to make explicit the combinations of devices, services and content that are relevant to them. The tasks and activities a user is currently involved in are each represented by a different group.

A lot of research into collaborating agents is done already [4][8], the main contribution of our approach is that we focus on the effects on user interaction.

3Restaurant Negotiator Scenario

Based on the notion of an ad hoc agent environment we developed a demonstrator application based on the following scenario: a group of tourists are spread throughout a city they are visiting. They want to have dinner together but do not know which places are available. They are connected through a wireless ad hoc network, and have a PDA that maintains this connection and that enables user interaction. On each PDA an agent mediates between the user and the global planning process.

Several issues can be investigated with this scenario and demonstrator implementation. These include: a) user attention, b) employing a user profile and c) agent autonomy.

The scheduling process is based on an iterated contract net protocol with the addition of a voting round on the proposed. The agents can be instructed by the user to act autonomously.

3.1Evaluation

The Restaurant Negotiator is a first application that is intended to demonstrate some of the user agent interaction issues that will come up in an ad hoc agent environment. It became apparent that it is difficult to let the user take control of the agent’s autonomy. Another aspect that introduces user interaction problems is the fact that agent work with deadlines. Currently we show the time left until the deadline to the user.

We currently investigate if and how we can further evaluate the user agent interaction issues, possibly with a formal user test.4Conclusions and Future Work

We presented a novel approach to user interaction in an ambient intelligent environment using agents, enabling us to relate actual technical possibilities and constraints to user interaction problems and solutions. An important relation between technology and user interaction is the autonomy of an agent versus the degree of user control. We plan to continue developing demonstrator applications to further research these relations and design and test possible solutions. One of these solutions is the group concept which we described the design in this paper. Testing will ultimately be done with human test subjects in a realistic environment.

5Acknowledgements

This research is part of the CACTUS project, which is a joint research project of Delft University of Technology and research and technology organisation TNO. CACTUS is part of the Freeband Impulse program, co-funded by the Dutch M inistry of Economic Affairs.

6References

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