Activity-oriented Instant Messaging for Coalition Operations.pdfVIP

Activity-oriented Instant Messaging for Coalition Operations Austin Tate, Jeff Dalton and Stephen Potter Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI), University of Edinburgh {a.tate,j.dalton,s.potter}@ed.ac.uk Abstract. I-X Process Panels are used to support users who are carrying out processes and responding to events in a cooperative working environment. The panels support the tracking of personal or group issues, the planning and execution of activities and the checking of constraints. Panels can be connected to other panels, and also to a range of services, agents and other cooperative working support tools to form part of a framework for activity and process support in an organization. The dynamically changing context in which a user operates is reflected in the options presented. Actual usage in a multi- national coalition operations setting indicated the value of adopting an “instant messaging” style of use. An augmented activity-orientated “intelligent messaging” approach is taken in which artificial intelligence planning technology can be deployed in a natural way. 1 Introduction I-X is a research programme with a number of different aspects intended to allow humans and computer systems to cooperate in the creation or modification of some product or products such as documents, plans, designs or physical entities - i.e., it supports mixed-initiative synthesis tasks (Tate, 2003). The I-X research draws on earlier work on Nonlin (Tate, 1977), O-Plan (Currie and Tate, 1991; Tate, 1995; Tate et al., 1998; Tate et al., 2000b, Levine et al. 2000), Optimum-AIV (Aarup, 1994, Tate, 1996b), I-N-OVA (Tate, 1996; 2000a) and the Enterprise Project (Fraser and Tate, 1995; Stader, 1996) but seeks to make the framework generic and to clarify terminology, simplify the approach taken, and increase re-usability and applicability of the core ideas. I-X Process Panels (I-P2) are used to support individual users who are carrying out proces