CHAPTER 9

INTELLIGENT INTERFACES

AS AGENTS

DAVID N. CHIN
Department of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Hawaii at Manoa
2565 The Mall
Honolulu, HI 96822
email: Chin@Hawaii.Edu

ABSTRACT

An intelligent interface cannot just respond passively to its user's commands and queries. It must be able to take the initiative in order to volunteer information, correct user misconceptions, or reject unethical user requests. To do these things, a system must be an intelligent agent. UCEgo is the intelligent agent component of UC (UNIX Consultant), a natural-language system that helps the user solve problems in using the UNIX operating system. UCEgo provides UC with its own goals and plans. By adopting different goals in different situations, UCEgo creates and executes different plans, enabling it to interact intelligently with the user. UCEgo adopts goals from its themes, adopts subgoalsduring planning, and adopts metagoals for dealing with goal interactions. It also adopts goals when it notices that the user either lacks necessary knowledge or has incorrect beliefs. In these cases, UCEgo plans to volunteer information or correct the user's misconception, as appropriate.

This is a reprint of chapter 9 in Joseph W. Sullivan and Sherman W. Tyler (Eds.), Intelligent User Interfaces, ACM Press, New York, 1991, pp. 127?206.

This research was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research, under grant N0014-48-C-0732; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DoD), under Darpa Order No. 4871, monitored by Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command under Contract N00039-84-C-0089; the National Science Foundation under grant #85-14890; and Hughes Aircraft grant #442427-59868.