Multi-Agent Plan Management for Socio-Cognitive Orthotics

该项目的目标是解决需要克服的技术问题，以建立社会认知矫形器系统，这将增强人类的认知能力，促进社会互动。信息技术可以帮助认知障碍患者管理他或她的日常生活，通过对患者想要或需要做的活动进行建模，监控患者的活动，并指导患者确保最重要的活动发生。因此，信息技术可以提供一种认知矫正器，增强下降的认知能力，帮助人们独立生活。然而，不幸的是，用对信息技术的依赖来取代对他人的依赖可能意味着社交互动的机会减少，而这反过来又会导致孤独和孤立。为了解决这个问题，一个人的社会认知矫正系统可以与其他人的系统联网。现在，随着时间的流逝，人们对自己的活动做出选择，这些选择可以帮助实现或使潜在的有计划的社会活动变得更加困难。因此，网络矫形器系统作为代表其关联用户的代理，需要作为一个协作的多代理系统来协同管理用户的计划。每个独立的系统都需要监控和指导用户的活动，同时给予用户尽可能多的自主权来独立控制他或她的一天，并且还必须尝试为社交活动提供理想的选择，这些活动显然必须与其他参与者的时间表相匹配。所有这些都应该以及时、适应和有效的方式完成。本项目将研究的假设是，将分层活动抽象和更丰富的约束模型整合到建立良好的时间约束网络表示中，并增强分布式约束推理技术以自适应地处理这些更灵活的表示，将为个人和社会活动的协作计划管理系统提供有原则和有效的基础。需要研究的一些关键思想包括：使用抽象的活动规范，可以推迟关于哪些特定活动将在何时由谁完成的承诺，直到需要做出决策；开发算法，可以利用甚至引入活动中的抽象、时间和（对于社交活动）参与者，以增加灵活性，减少计算和通信；代表不同的活动计划，即使它们相互矛盾，为重要的社会（和个人）活动留下许多选择；并在模型中捕获活动的重要性和违反约束的成本，以便在（可能的）情况下计算权衡，在这种情况下，多智能体计划的发展导致了争议的产生。该项目将建立在当前最先进的分层多智能体规划和协调、单智能体计划管理和分布式约束推理基础上。它将结合多智能体活动建模、持续分布式约束网络维护、自适应细化和约束放松机制的新思想，创新实用的计算技术，将扩展到涉及不断发展的世界中复杂相互关系的多智能体应用。该项目将设计、开发、分析和经验测试用于松散耦合计划的持续协作多代理管理的新技术，这是一个值得更多研究的问题，并且没有一般的直觉或解决方法存在。发展社会认知矫形学，可以经济有效地利用信息技术促进认知障碍者的独立，同时消除他们的孤立，从而产生巨大的社会效益。这个项目的另一个预期影响是，它将成为认知辅助信息技术课程的基础，这门课程不仅将向一年级本科生介绍计算机科学概念，还将向他们介绍计算机科学家可能做出的社会贡献。预计这样的课程可以吸引更多的学生，特别是女性和少数民族，主修计算机科学。

The objective of this project is to solve technical problems that need to be overcome to build socio-cognitive orthotic systems, which will augment human cognitive capabilities to promote social interactions. Information technology can help a person with cognitive impairment in managing his or her everyday life, by modeling the activities the person wants or needs to do, monitoring the person's activities as they unfold, and guiding the person to ensure that the most important activities occur. Thus, information technology can provide a cognitive orthotic that augments reduced cognitive abilities and helps the person live independently. Unfortunately, though, replacing dependence on other people with reliance on information technology can mean fewer opportunities for social interaction, which in turn can lead to loneliness and isolation. To solve this problem, a person's socio-cognitive orthotic system could be networked with the systems of other people. Now, as time passes and people make choices about their activities, these choices can help bring about, or make more difficult, potential planned social activities. Thus, the networked orthotic systems, as agents acting on behalf of their associated users, need to behave as a collaborative multi-agent system to cooperatively manage the users' plans. Each separate system needs to monitor and guide its user's activities while giving its user as much autonomy as possible to independently control his or her day, and yet must also attempt to maintain desirable options for social activities that obviously must be timed well with the schedules of other participants. And all this should be done in a timely, adaptive, and efficient way. The hypothesis that this project will investigate is that incorporating hierarchical activity abstractions and richer constraint models into well-founded temporal constraint network representations, and augmenting distributed constraint reasoning techniques to adaptively handle these more flexible representations, will provide a principled and efficient foundation for collaborative plan management systems for individual and social activities. Some of the key ideas to be investigated include: using abstract activity specifications that can postpone commitments about which particular activities will be done, when, and by whom, until decisions need to be made; developing algorithms that can exploit, and even introduce, abstractions in activities, their timing, and (for social activities) their participants to increase flexibility and to reduce computation and communication; representing alternative activity plans, even if they contradict each other, to leave many options open for important social (and individual) activities; and capturing activity importance and costs of violating constraints in the models to calculate tradeoffs in the (likely) case where the multi-agent plans evolve such that contentions arise. The project will build from the current state-of-the-art in hierarchical multi-agent planning and coordination, single-agent plan management, and distributed constraint reasoning. It will incorporate new ideas in multi-agent activity modeling, continual distributed constraint network maintenance, and adaptive refinement and constraint relaxation mechanisms, to innovate practical computational techniques that will scale to multi-agent applications involving complex interrelationships in continually-evolving worlds. The project will design, develop, analyze, and empirically test novel techniques for continual collaborative multi-agent management of loosely-coupled plans, a problem that deserves more study and for which no general intuitions or solution methods exist. Developing socio-cognitive orthotics, where information technology can be cost-effectively used to simultaneously promote independence while combating isolation for cognitively-impaired people, can have tremendous societal benefits. A further expected impact of this project is that it will form the basis for a course in information technology for cognitive assistance, which will introduce first-year undergraduates not only to computer science concepts but also to the possible societal contributions computer scientists can make. It is expected that such a course can attract more students, and particularly women and minorities, to major in computer science.