AAAI-10 Workshop on Goal Directed Autonomy (GDA)
Call for Participation 

Description 

How should an agent or group of collaborating agents, designed to
exhibit “intelligent” behavior, respond to unanticipated failures and
opportunities during plan execution in a complex (e.g., partially
observable, stochastic, dynamic, continuous, multi-agent) environment?
We argue that they should reason about their goals. In particular,
they should (1) detect situations that may trigger goal reasoning, (2)
explain why the situation demands attention, (3) decide how to respond
(e.g., via goal(s) formulation), and (4) manage the current set goals,
which may involve tasks such as goal interruption, transformation,
resumption, and/or deletion. This workshop will assess the benefits
and limitations of alternative GDA conceptual models, representations,
and reasoning methods, along with their evaluation and (potential)
applications.

Agents are typically told what goals to pursue and cannot modify
them. Some methods (e.g., for contingency planning, dynamic
replanning) can respond to execution failures, but usually ignore
opportunities and do not reason about the goals themselves. GDA
relaxes some common assumptions of classical planning (e.g., static
environments, fixed goals, no unpredictable exogenous events), and
requires attention to new issues (e.g., when, how, and what new
goals should be formulated?). Many application contexts exist (e.g.,
analysis of social/cultural behaviors, workflow processing, real-time
video games, military missions, disaster management).

Topics
- Theoretical models 
- Representation and (meta-)reasoning methods
- Roles for machine learning and/or other capabilities
- GDA enhanced planning models
- Demonstrations of utility
- Evaluation/analyses
- Comparing/contrasting GDA with other approaches
- Applications (and potential applications) 

Format

This one-day workshop will include a comprehensive introductory
presentation, example GDA scenarios, paper presentations, break-out
sessions for groups to identify potential GDA models and applicable
methods, and their summary presentations. We will also include a
panel on challenges for designing, implementing, and evaluating GDA
systems. Additional time will be reserved for demos, Q/A, and
discussion of workshop topics/presentations. Interested and curious
researchers are most welcome!

Attendance 

This workshop is limited to 75 invited attendees. Please notify
co-organizer David Aha (david.aha at nrl.navy.mil) if you wish to
attend.

Submission requirements

Please email AAAI-styled PDF submissions (max 6 pages), GDA system
demos (4), or letters of interest (1-2) to David Aha.

Organizing Committee

David Aha (NRL), Matthew Klenk (NRC/NRL), Hector Munoz-Avila (Lehigh
University), Ashwin Ram (Georgia Institute of Technology), Daniel
Shapiro (ISLE)

URL: http://home.earthlink.net/~dwaha/research/meetings/aaai10-gda