Abstract
Fictional stories abound where artificial intelligence gives rise to man-made servants that make our lives a holiday (or a nightmare). Naturally, the optimist has a strong motive to ask: How might we design and implement an artificial servant? We regularly operate under the notion that one agent helps another by doing something for the other. However, the story behind this is much more complicated. In this position paper, we explore two questions: What is the nature of service that is helpful or “good”? and What will it take to design and implement agents that provide “good” service? We start by describing our current understanding of the nature of service, consisting of a number of dimensions along which service may be measured and compared, and three modes in which service may be delivered. With these dimensions and modes setting the stage, we consider the technical and social requirements for implementing artificial servants. We find that while many prerequisites are either already available or could reasonably be developed from the current state of the art, both technical and social challenges remain that are expected to be very difficult to overcome. Our experimental work attempts to generate and evaluate the fundamental elements of helpful assistance, and we provide a brief overview of our work. One surprising empirical result reminds us of a common understanding about help: providing assistance is a two-way street. Developing that two-way street may prove to be one of the most significant obstacles to realizing an artificial personal servant.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Benyon, D., Mival, O.: Scenarios for Companions. In: Trappl, R. (ed.) Your Virtual Butler. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 7407, pp. 71–88. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Billsus, D., Pazzani, M.J.: A hybrid user model for news story classification. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on User Modeling, UM 1999, pp. 99–108. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus (1999)
Delisle, S., Moulin, B.: User interfaces and help systems: From helplessness to intelligent assistance. Artificial Intelligence Review 18(2), 117–151 (2002), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1015179704819
Faulring, A., Mohnkern, K., Steinfeld, A., Myers, B.A.: Successful user interfaces for radar. In: CHI 2008 Workshop on Usable Artificial Intelligence (2008)
Gassner, R., Steinmüller, K.: Tina and Her Butler. In: Trappl, R. (ed.) Your Virtual Butler. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 7407. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Gervasio, M.T., Iba, W., Langley, P.: Learning user evaluation functions for adaptive scheduling assistance. In: Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 1999, pp. 152–161. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (1999)
Heuwinkel, K.: Framing the Invisible - The Social Background of Trust. In: Trappl, R. (ed.) Your Virtual Butler. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 7407, pp. 8–18. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Iba, W.: When is assistance really helpful? In: Interaction Challenges for Intelligent Assistants: Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2007)
Iba, W., Burwell, N.: Building a testbed for studying service. In: Proceedings of the Stanford Spring Symposium on Persistent Assistants: Living and Working with Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, Palo Alto (2005)
Iba, W., Burwell, N.: Studying service: An exploration of the costs and benefits of assistance. In: Proceedings of the 18th International FLAIRS Conference. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2005)
Iba, W., Gervasio, M.: Adapting to user preferences in crisis response. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 1999, pp. 87–90. ACM, New York (1999), doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/291080.291095
Iba, W., Holm, J.: Assistance: Is it better to receive than to give? In: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 84–87. CSREA Press, Las Vegas (2006)
Langley, P.: User modeling in adaptive interfaces. In: User Modeling: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference, UM 1999. SpringWien (1999)
Meyers, K., Berry, P., Blythe, J., Conley, K., Gervasio, M., McGuinness, D., Morley, D., Pfeffer, A., Pollack, M., Tambe, M.: An intelligent personal assistant for task and time management. AI Magazine 28(2), 47–61 (2007)
Myers, K.L., Yorke-Smith, N.: Proactive behavior of a personal assistive agent. In: Proceedings of the AAMAS Workshop on Metareasoning in Agent-Based Systems, Honolulu, HI, pp. 31–45 (2007)
Rank, S.: What Issue Should Your Virtual Butler Solve Next? In: Trappl, R. (ed.) Your Virtual Butler. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 7407, pp. 171–178. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Iba, W. (2013). Before We Get There, Where Are We Going?. In: Trappl, R. (eds) Your Virtual Butler. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7407. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37346-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37346-6_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37345-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37346-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)