CompCog: Helping people make more future-minded decisions using optimal gamification

帮助人们、团队和组织实现重要目标可能是提高生产力和促进人类进步的最有效方式之一。为了实现他们的目标，许多组织采用财务激励或游戏元素，如分数、级别和徽章，以激励员工提高工作效率。这个项目为设计更好的激励结构以帮助人们实现他们的目标开发了一个理论基础和计算工具。该项目将心理学研究的目标实现的关键挑战与人工智能可以用来解决这些挑战的计算方法联系起来。通过弥合这一差距，该项目为人工智能与人们交流提供了一种新的方式，并使他们能够克服动机障碍和认知限制，否则这些障碍可能会阻碍他们做出正确的决定。这个项目的核心是优化激励结构的数学理论，以帮助人们在复杂的、部分未知的环境中做出更好的决定。这一理论被用作两个认知假体的基础，这两个假体利用人工智能和游戏化来帮助人们实现他们的目标：一个是帮助人们变得更有生产力、更少拖延的智能待办事项游戏化系统，另一个是强化好习惯的应用程序。现场实验被用来评估这些认知假体在现实世界中是否有效，致力于开发能够帮助人们设定和实现目标的智能系统。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Helping people, teams, and organizations achieve important goals may be one of the most effective ways to increase productivity and promote human progress. To achieve their goals, many organizations employ financial incentives or game elements, such as points, levels, and badges, to motivate employees to become more productive. This project develops a theoretical foundation and computational tools for designing better incentive structures to help people achieve their goals. The project connects the crucial challenges of goal achievement studied in psychology to the computational methods from artificial intelligence that can be used to solve them. By bridging this gap the project provides a new way for artificial intelligence to communicate with people and empowers them to overcome the motivational obstacles and cognitive limitations that might otherwise prevent them from making good decisions. At the heart of this project is a mathematical theory for optimizing incentive structures to help people make better decisions in complex, partially unknown environments. This theory is used as the basis for two cognitive prostheses that leverage artificial intelligence and gamification to help people achieve their goals: an intelligent to-do list gamification system that helps people become more productive and procrastinate less and an app that reinforces good habits. Field experiments are used to evaluate whether these cognitive prostheses are effective in the real world, working towards the development of intelligent systems that can aid people in setting and achieving their goals.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.