4th Annual Human-Agent-Robot Teamwork Workshop

In conjunction with the 7th ACM/IEEE International
Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2012)
Boston, USA, March 5-8, 2012, 8am-5pm

Teamwork has become a widely accepted metaphor for describing the nature of multi-robot and multi-agent cooperation. By virtue of teamwork models, team members attempt to manage general responsibilities and commitments to each other in a coherent fashion that both enhances performance and facilitates recovery when unanticipated problems arise. Whereas early research on teamwork focused mainly on interaction within groups of autonomous agents or robots, there is a growing interest in leveraging human participation effectively. Unlike autonomous systems designed primarily to take humans out of the loop, many important applications require people, agents, and robots to work together in close and relatively continuous interaction. For software agents and robots to participate in teamwork alongside people in carrying out complex real-world tasks, they must have some of the capabilities that enable natural and effective teamwork among groups of people. Just as important, developers of such systems need tools and methodologies to assure that such systems will work together reliably and safely, even when they have been designed independently.

The purpose of the HART workshop is to explore theories, methods, and tools in support of humans, agents and robots working together in teams. Position papers that combine findings from fields such as computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, anthropology, social and organizational psychology, human-computer interaction to address the problem of HART are strongly encouraged. The workshop will formulate perspectives on the current state-of-the-art, identify key challenges and opportunities for future studies, and promote community-building among researchers and practitioners.

Workshop Overview

The workshop will be structured around four two-hour sessions on themes relevant to HART. Each session will consist of presentations and questions on selected position papers, followed by a whole-group discussion of the current state-of-the-art and the key challenges and research opportunities relevant to the theme. During the final hour, the workshop organizers will facilitate a discussion to determine next steps. The workshop will be deemed a success when collaborative scientific projects for the coming year are defined, and publication venues are explored. For example, results from the most recent HART workshop (Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, December 2010) will be reflected in a special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems on HART that is slated to appear in March/April 2012.

Target Audience

No special prerequisites are demanded. However, participation in the workshop will be limited, with authors and presenters given priority. All attendees must register for both the HRI conference and the workshop. This emerging field is inherently inter-disciplinary, thus the workshop brings together researchers from such as computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, anthropology, social and organizational psychology, human-computer interaction.

Agenda

   Session: Theories and Methods (chair: Maarten Sierhuis)    Session: Reasoning Aspects (chair: Maarten Sierhuis)    Session: Social Aspects (chair: Virginia Dignum)    Session: Additional Topics (chair: Jeff Bradshaw)    Late-Breaking Contributions (not on the agenda)

Important Dates

Organizer Contact Information

Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Ph.D.
Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Pensacola, FL USA
Email: jbradshaw@ihmc.us
URL: http://www.ihmc.us/groups/jbradshaw

Virginia Dignum, Ph.D.
Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Email: M.V.Dignum@tudelft.nl
URL: http://tbm.tudelft.nl/index.php?id=30130&L=1

Catholijn M. Jonker, Ph.D.
Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Email: C.M.jonker@tudelft.nl
URL: http://mmi.tudelft.nl/~catholijn/

Maarten Sierhuis, Ph.D.
Email: sierhuis@ejenta.com

Organizer Biographical Sketches

Jeffrey M. Bradshaw (Ph.D., Cognitive Science, University of Washington) is a Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) where he leads the research group developing the KAoS policy and domain services framework and (with Marco Carvalho) the development of the Luna Agent Framework and the IHMC Cyber Framework. Formerly, he led research groups at The Boeing Company and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Jeff has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at EURISCO in Toulouse, France; an Honorary Visiting Researcher at the University of Edinburgh; a visiting professor at the Institut Cognitique at the University of Bordeaux; is former chair of ACM SIGART; and former chair of the RIACS Science Council for NASA Ames Research Center. He served as a member of the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience Research in the Next Two Decades, as a scientific advisor to the Japanese NEC Technology Paradigm Shifts initiative, and as an advisor to the HCI and Visualization program at the German National AI Research Center (DFKI). He currently serves as a member of the Board on Global Science and Technology for the National Academies and as an external advisory board member of the Cognitive Science and Technology Program at Sandia National Laboratories. Jeff served for over a decade on the Board of Directors of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. In 2011, he received the Web Intelligence Consortium Outstanding Contributions Award. He has many years of editorial board experience on professional journals and in the organization of international conferences and workshops. He serves as co-editor of the Human-Centered Computing Department for IEEE Intelligent Systems. Among many other publications, he edited the books Knowledge Acquisition as a Modeling Activity (with Ken Ford, Wiley, 1993), Software Agents (AAAI Press/The MIT Press, 1997), and Readings in Human-Centered Computing (with Robert Hoffman, IEEE, in press).

Jeff has participated in NASA Blue Sky Study Groups for the “Human-Centered Vision of Mars Exploration” and for the “Small Pressurized Rover.” From 2002-2006, his KAoS framework was used as part of a NASA series of annual two-week field tests of human-robot teams performing simulated planetary surface exploration at the Mars Desert Research Station. Jeff was sponsored by DHS to undertake detailed simulation studies of the use of human-robot teams to secure facilities at Port Everglades. He has also led the ONR-sponsored NAIMT and Coordinated Operations projects where a team of humans and heterogeneous robots performed field exercises aimed at port reconnaissance, and robot-assisted detection and apprehension of intruders.

Virginia Dignum is a professor at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology. She got her PhD in 2004 from the Utrecht University. Previously, she worked for more than 12 years in consultancy and system development in the areas of expert systems and knowledge management. Her research focuses on agent based models of organizations, in particular in the dynamic aspects of organizations, and the applicability of agent organizations to support knowledge creation, sharing and representation in distributed environments, and the interaction between people and intelligent systems in particular the behavior of hybrid teams. In 2006, she was awarded the prestigious Veni grant from NWO (Dutch Organization for Scientific Research) for her work on agent-based organizational frameworks. She has organized many international conferences and workshops, and was co-organizer of AAMAS 2005. She is involved in national and EU projects and has more than 90 peer-reviewed publications.

Catholijn Jonker is professor of Man-Machine Interaction at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science of the Delft University of Technology. She studied computer science, and did her PhD studies at Utrecht University. After a post-doc position in Bern, Switzerland, she became assistant (later associate) professor at the Department of Artificial Intelligence of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. From September 2004 until September 2006 she was a full professor of Artificial Intelligence / Cognitive Science at the Nijmegen Institute of Cognition and Information of the Radboud University Nijmegen. She chaired De Jonge Akademie (Young Academy) of the KNAW (The Royal Netherlands Society of Arts and Sciences) in 2005 and 2006, and she is a member of the same organization from 2005 through 2010. Her recent publications address cognitive processes and concepts such as trust, negotiation, and the dynamics of individual agents and organizations. In Delft she works with an interdisciplinary team to engineer human experience through multi-modal interaction between natural and artificial actors in a social dynamic context.

Maarten Sierhuis is a computer scientist interested in blending methods of social science and computer science in the engineering of human-centered systems. His research is in the development and application of agent-oriented languages for modeling and simulating work practice. Most recently, he managed PARC’s Knowledge, Language, and Interaction research area. Prior to joining PARC, Maarten worked for over 12 years at NASA Ames Research Center in the Intelligent Systems Division. In the first ten years Maarten was senior scientist at RIACS/USRA. In the last two years being at NASA ARC he was a Senior Systems Scientist at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. At NASA, Maarten was leader of the Brahms team and Co-Principal Investigator of the Brahms multi-agent modeling and simulation environment. Maarten was responsible for developing the first multi-agent system supporting flight controllers in NASA’s Mission Control Center for the International Space Station.