Workshop on Taskability

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

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.