Service and Helpfulness
The Problem
What is the nature of service? This question carries with it a number of assumptions and raises numerous secondary questions. I take it as a given that we have all experienced interactions that we found lacking in "service" and that most of us have experienced (if all too rarely) instances of service that left us more than satisfied. Yet with this common experience, why is it that we have a very fuzzy understanding of the factors that made the former situations undesirable and the latter exemplary. In other words, what is it that makes some people and some actions "helpful" and others not? Through this research program, I want to better understand those factors and thereby build better computational assistants -- and ultimately be a better servant to others myself.
Approach
To study helpfulness, we create opportunities for interactions between artificial agents within simulated environments and measure problem solving success and efficiency. One of several environments we have used, MÆDEN, provides a constrained grid-world in which we can pose tasks of varying difficulty. We have implemented an agent architecture, GARCIA, that supports the instantiation of agents with distinct skill sets by selecting a particular combination of skills from a menu. Thus, we can easily create and test agents with a wide variety of competencies. Likewise, we can combine agents with disparate and complementary skills. Our preliminary GARCIA agents have one goal and ask other agents for help as needed to accomplish that goal. With extensions to GARCIA (supported by corresponding changes to the MÆDEN simulator), agents simultaneously pursue multiple goals and must switch focus between them as deemed appropriate. We attempt to quantify the helpfulness of the service recieved by an agent under various conditions that include task difficulty, respective competencies of the primary and helper agents, priority of the helpers' competing tasks, as well as other factors.
Publications
- Iba, W. (2013). Before we get there, where are we going? In R. Trappl (Ed.), Your Virtual Butler: The Making-of. (pp. 46-61). LNAI 7407. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
- Iba, W. (2007). When is assistance really helpful?, Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium, Interaction Challenges for Intelligent Assistants. (TR SS-07-04). Stanford: AAAI Press.
- Iba, W. & Holm, J. (2006). Assistance: is it better to receive than to give?, Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Las Vegas: NV.
- Iba, W. & Burwell, N. (2005). Studying service: an exploration of the costs and benefits of assistance, Proceedings of the 18th International FLAIRS Conference. Clearwater, FL: AAAI Press.
- Iba, W. & Burwell, N. (2005). Building a testbed for studying service, Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium, Persistent Assistants: Living and Working with AI. Stanford: AAAI Press.