CAREER: Plan-Based Integration of Control and Coherence in Intelligent Exploratory Environments

探索性环境-虚拟世界，用户与物理或抽象空间的模拟进行交互，以形成，追求和实现他们的目标-在从教育和培训到娱乐到社交互动的应用中取得了巨大的成功。 然而，这些系统的主要限制是，用户在其中的活动通常受到极大的过度约束或约束不足。 为了解决这个问题，PI将为探索性环境中的用户交互结构开发新的基于计划的模型。 规划技术将用于在环境中创建新的活动，包括系统控制的角色，环境和用户的动作。 PI将建立在他之前在计划生成和计划相关通信方面的工作基础上，开发一种用于在智能探索环境中创建，监控和控制交互的架构。 该架构将整合：规划算法，其创建用于在其结构易于被用户理解的虚拟世界中的交互的计划;话语生成算法，其有效地传达当前展开的基于计划的活动;以及执行监视算法，其调解用户界面和虚拟世界之间的动作的执行，当用户打算执行的操作偏离系统当前计划结构时，以适当的方式进行干预。 如果成功的话，这项工作将大大提高我们创造引人入胜、新颖有效的虚拟环境的能力，在这种环境中，用户的领域和任务导向的学习在一系列应用程序和环境中得到增强。

Exploratory environments - virtual worlds in which users interact with a simulation of a physical or abstract space to form, pursue and achieve their goals - have shown great success in applications ranging from education and training to entertainment to social interaction. A principal limitation of these systems, however, is that users' activities within them are typically greatly over- or under-constrained. To address this problem, the PI will develop new plan-based models for the structure of user interactions within exploratory environments. Planning techniques will be used to create novel activity within the environment that encompasses both the system-controlled characters, the environment and the actions of the user. The PI will build on his prior work in plan generation and plan-related communication to develop an architecture for creating, monitoring and controlling interaction in intelligent exploratory environments. This architecture will integrate: planning algorithms that create plans for interaction in virtual worlds whose structure is readily understandable by users; discourse generation algorithms that effectively communicate the currently unfolding plan-based activity; and execution monitoring algorithms that mediate the execution of actions between the user interface and the virtual world, intervening in appropriate ways when actions that the user intends to perform deviate from the system's current plan structure. If successful, the work will greatly increase our ability to produce engaging, novel and effective virtual environments in which users' domain- and task-oriented learning are enhanced across a range of applications and contexts.