Intelligent Decision Technologies

Users presented with a system equipped with many advanced features and vast collections of searchable documents often have problems getting to the information they seek. Our studies with intelligence analysts using the Rosetta Web-based information access system revealed inefficiencies in the way they used the tool. Motivated by that observation, we implemented a prototype of an intelligent software agent that monitors the behavior of users with a goal of generating real-time suggestions to improve their performance. To evaluate the agent's ability to predict the changes in the analysts' performance, we compared it to the judgment of human domain experts. The results revealed evidence of substantial disagreement among human judges. We found the level of agreement among the judges and the agent to be much higher. The agent's predictions were similar to those of an average judge.

In this article we describe our approach towards the specification and realization of human-computer interaction within Next Generation Ambient Intelligent Environments (NGAIE). These environments are populated with numerous devices and multiple occupants or users. They exhibit increasingly intelligent behaviour, provide optimized resource usage and support consistent functionality and human-centric operation. In our approach, NGAIEs contain an encoding of local and global knowledge in the form of a set of heterogeneous ontologies, which have to be aligned. This is to provide a uniform and consistent knowledge representation. In NGAIEs humans will interact with their environments seamlessly using multimodal dialogue interaction. To enable such adaptive human-computer interaction we then focus on when and how this knowledge can be modelled and used in order to realize complex, negotiative, and collaborative tasks. The combination of heterogeneous ontologies and ontology matching algorithms allows for semantically rich interaction and information exchange. Based on an agent-based, service-oriented architecture, this combination maximizes the use of available interaction resources, while decoupling interaction specification from interfaces and modalities. We illustrate our approach with a task analysis of a scenario showing the challenges of NGAIEs. Finally, we present ontology prototypes that are required for the implementation of the scenario.

A chemical process design problem has several objective functions and systems approach is required for the problem solving. In a process design laboratory, it is desired for instructors to help students notice important cause-and-effect relations in the process design problem. However there are several important relations and no single correct answer in the design problem, so that is difficult for beginner instructors to give adequate advices to each student. The objects of this paper are to propose knowledge-based environments for the decision making of beginner instructors during the instruction and to discuss the results of an implemented system which makes a process that a student builds his/her knowledge structure visible. In the environments, Interpretive Structural Modeling(ISM) is applied to represent knowledge structures. The system is composed of two types of agents, called the “student agent” and “coach agent” and represents the process that the student agent builds the knowledge structure through their interactions. For accessibility, to create the agents, set up the agents, execute interaction between the agents, and monitor the process can be performed on the web.

The paper elaborates on the design and use of cross-organization virtual community spaces facilitating knowledge-based collaborative engagement in the practice of a boundary spanning alliance. Our approach builds upon the concept of transformable boundary artifacts and advances a perspective upon their design as first class objects in common information spaces. Using a case study on vacation package assembly, we identify offline elements of practice and discuss the components of an interaction vocabulary devised to facilitate their transformable interactive embodiment. Transformations allow boundary artifacts to exhibit plasticity as they transcend different social worlds and computing contexts within the cross-organization virtual community space, which in turn, forms the virtuality through which members make sense of collaborative work and contribute to a shared mission. Such contributions are materialized through recurrent interactions with different versions of boundary artifacts, which remain consistent and synchronized at all times.

The widely recognised transition to e-work brought by recent advances in Web Intelligence, the Grid, virtual social networks and the knowledge economy has considerably changed our working pattern, and created new challenges for collaborative work support systems. In this paper, e-Workbench – a novel framework for building adaptive systems for collaborative e-work is proposed. e-Workbench is based on the Knowledge Grid, and provides support for task-centred knowledge construction by generating knowledge element models for adaptively locating and retrieving knowledge services within the Knowledge Grid environment. The Knowledge Grid offers a uniform platform for large-scale human-machine collaboration and effective knowledge sharing and management across the Internet from which on-demand knowledge for supporting collaborative e-work could be harnessed. The potentials of e-Workbench in exploiting the Knowledge Grid in order to provide adaptive support to problem-solving and decision-making in collaborative e-work are described. The approach integrates a number of intelligent systems techniques for acquiring knowledge about work, and uses an ontology-based metadata model for knowledge representation and a semantic link network structure for e-workflow modelling.