Thursday, November 11, Volen 101, 2:00-3.00 pm
In this talk I will discuss Collagen, a discourse manager for an agent that collaborates with a user on interface tasks, co-created with Chuck Rich of MERL, a Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab. In creating Collagen, we used research in discourse theory and models of collaboration to design the system so that it could participate in natural conversations about tasks a user was undertaking in an application with a user interface. Collagen is a general purpose capability that is "instantiated" for particular applications. I will demo a Collagen agent working with a user on scheduling airine trips. I will discuss in more detail and demonstrate Daffy, a Collagen agent for interacting with a user doing email. Daffy is a speech enabled agent, and I will explore the extensions we made to Collagen to make this capability possible.
Host: Rick Alterman