The intelligent classroom: providing competent assistance

In the software industry, designers are forever trying to “improve” their products by adding ever more features to them, producing bloated software systems that are capable of doing just about anything. However, these systems often make it increasingly difficult for their users to perform their tasks as they are forced to wade through a mess of unwanted features to find the few that they actually need. We believe that a fruitful area of research is in building intelligent systems for particular tasks and then having the systems actively try to assist their users in performing these tasks. Such a system knows the plans (and the problems associated with those plans) that their users are likely to pursue. These \textit{competent assistants} can use their expertise on their particular tasks to guide their users through their tasks, provide better help, or perhaps even volunteer to take over some part of the task. Such an assistive agent is able to helpful because, through its task knowledge, it is able to limit what it needs to consider in cooperating with its user. In this paper we look at the implementation of a competent assistant that functions in a physical domain. The Intelligent Classroom is a prototype automated lecture facility that serves as its own audio/visual assistant. We focus on the representations and algorithms to use task knowledge to produce cooperative behavior, arguing these techniques could easily to be extended for use in a wide range of domains (i.e. both physical and purely electronic domains).