Workshop on Taskability

本研讨会关注认知主体的“任务能力”，即智能和适应性强的系统接受人类面向任务的高级指令，并将这些面向目标的指令转化为适当分解的感知、推理或行动计划的能力。目前对认知系统和主体的研究总体上允许操作者以与主体的特定设计相对应的低级动作基元的形式向主体发出指示，或者受高阶动作语言的约束，所述高层动作语言被设计成足以作为相同种类主体特定行为的某些序列的简写。这次研讨会讨论了这一紧急专题的四个关键考虑因素：1)明确界定这一新的研究领域，使研究议程能够富有成效地进行；2)确定最需要解决的科学和技术问题，以创建符合可任务性定义的系统；3)将其进一步分解为研究和开发需求，这些需求是此类研究的前身；以及4)探索组建一个关于可任务性的研究共同体。Taskability具有改变人类与智能系统交互方式的潜力。指示各种代理执行未预先编程的任务的能力，将对更广泛的人工智能企业产生深远影响，并最终对将丰富人们日常生活的技术产生深远影响。

This workshop concerns the "taskability" of cognitive agents, meaning the ability of an intelligent and adaptable system to accept high level, task-oriented instructions from a human and translate those goal-oriented directives into a suitably decomposed plan of sensing, reasoning, or action. The current state of the art in research for cognitive systems and agents in general allows human handlers to issue directions to agents either in terms of lower level action primitives that correspond to the agent's particular design, or constrained by a higher-order action language that is engineered to suffice as a shorthand for some sequence of the same kinds of agent-specific behaviors. This workshop is addressing four key considerations for this emergent topic: 1) defining this new research area with sufficient clarity that research agendas can proceed productively; 2) identifying the science and technology issues that most be addressed to create systems that meet that definition of taskability; 3) decomposing that further into research and development needs that are the precursors to such research; and 4) exploring the formation of a research community on taskability. Taskability holds the potential to transform the way humans interact with intelligent systems. The ability to instruct a wide variety of agents to perform tasks that are not preprogrammed will have a profound effect on the broader AI enterprise, and eventually on the technologies that will enrich the daily lives of people.