Invited Talks and Panels

Artificial intelligence focuses on agents carrying out tasks in an environment. Consider the evolution of the agent-task-environment triple. In Good Old Fashioned AI and Robotics (GOFAIR), a single agent typically solved a puzzle in a fully-observable, fully-predictable world. Constraintbased agents were initially proposed in that paradigm. Robot soccer, developed in our lab in 1991, caught on as an international challenge task. The community had to deal with multiagent, dynamic, online, situated, embodied activity in a partially-observable, partially-predictable world. We evolved new constraint-based hybrid agent controllers for such tasks. The main challenge is to design agents that are both proactive and reactive. As our systems migrate into the real world, critical issues of reliability, trust and ethics must be addressed. For example, making ethical choices about our mutual interactions with robots presupposes that we are able to foresee the possible future effects of that interaction (or inaction). This presupposition puts strong requirements on the design space for robot architectures. We cannot use ad hoc or opaque models of robot structure or function. We need languages for modeling the constraints on an agent’s dynamics (where we may take “dynamics” quite abstractly) and languages for writing constraint-based behavioral specifications. Moreover, we need techniques for determining if an agent will, or is likely to, satisfy its specifications. Some of the exciting new applications of our science, such as assistive technology, require that we pay particular attention to these concerns of reliability and trust. AAAI President Alan Mackworth is a professor of computer science and Canada Research Chair in artificial intelligence at the University of British Columbia. He works on constraint-based computational intelligence with applications in vision, robotics, and situated agents, and is a pioneer in the areas of constraint satisfaction, robot soccer, and constraint-based agents. Mackworth has published over 100 scientific papers, and coauthored Computational Intelligence: A Logical Approach. In addition, he has served as president of IJCAI and also CSCSI. He was the founding director of the UBC Laboratory for Computational Intelligence.