Papers about Cognition

This workshop call demonstrates that our field is eager to move beyond first-generation generalist projects, toward a more mature practice. To do so, we seek to set up a common set of expectations and criteria for how to judge our work. In this paper, we propose some subclasses of embodied conversational character research and design, with criteria for describing and evaluating research and design advances in each. We suggest that researchers in this field could benefit from carefully... Read more

As this paper illustrates, a lot of work is being directed at the development of agents. Researchers are exploring ways to make agents smarter, to allow them to learn by observing us, to make them appear more lifelike. However, relatively little work is being focused on how people might actually experience agents, and on how agents might be designed so that we feel comfortable with them. Read more

Since the beginning of recorded history, people have been fascinated with the idea of non-human agencies. Popular notions about androids, humanoids, robots, cyborgs, and science fiction creatures permeate our culture, forming the unconscious backdrop against which software agents are perceived. The word “robot,” derived from the Czech word for drudgery, became popular following Karel Capek’s 1921 play RUR: Rossum Universal Robots. While Capek’s robots were factory workers, the public has also at times embraced the... Read more

The concept of an agent has recently become important in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its relatively youthful subfield, Distributed AI (DAI). Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide the area into three themes (though as the reader will see, these divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent... Read more

SIR is a computer system, programmed in the LISP language, which accepts information and answers questions expressed in a restricted form of English. This system demonstrates what can reasonably be called an ability to "understand" semantic information. SIR's semantic and deductive ability is based on the construction of an internal model, which uses word associations and property lists, for the relational information normally conveyed in conversational statements. A format-matching procedure extracts semantic content from English... Read more