Abstract for AISB 2000: How to Design a Functioning Mind
AUTHOR: Takafumi Tsuchiya
tsuchiya@sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp
School of computer and cognitive sciences,
Chukyo Univeristy,
101 Tokodate Kaizu Toyota 470-0393 Japan
POSTER TITLE: Functions for the management of valuable goals:
Goal scheduling and action mode switching done by
an autonomous agent on the basis of situational
urgency
ABSTRACT:
The purpose of this research is to design an
autonomous agent that operates in a simple
world of a video game type. The agent in
this world is required to set and achieve
multiple goals with various degrees of urgency.
Urgency of a goal is an important situational
cognition made by a problem solver with limited
temporal resource. During the period when no action is
taken, the urgency of each goal present will
increase as the available time for accomplishing
the goal-achievement action diminishes.
This research follows the functional studies of
problem solving in cognitive science. While the studies
have considered human beings as efficient problem
solving systems and revealed the situated nature of
cognitive architecture, they still seem to leave out
some important issues that influence situated everyday
problem solving. One such is time, and another is the
subjective value for each goal. A person is not only
an adaptive planner for achieving a single goal but
also a pursuer of multiple goals. They are efficient in
setting, concentrating, suspending, discarding, and
achieving some of possible goals in accordance with
cognitive appraisal of urgency that is strongly tied
with personal importance of each goal and limited time.
This research employs the serially fashioned
architecture for coping with situations in the
simplified world, and intends to specify various
functions for the management of valuable goals.
The agent embedded in this simplified world is
designed to have three phases in the problem solving.
The first phase is the planning to make a better plan
that is searched as a solution path of operators in a
problem space for a single goal. The second phase is
the goal scheduling in the face of multiple goals,
the function of which is to schedule how to achieve
the given set of goals in what order. Note that, while
the target goal is being achieved, the urgency values
of other goals in queue will increase due to the
decrement in the available time for their achievement.
The scheduling rule proposed aims to reduce the sum of
urgency values of all the goals by using a heuristics
called the urgency comparison. The third phase,
the action mode selection, does the switching of its
action mode between the execution mode and the
deliberation mode in accordance with the urgency
presented by the current goal. If this urgency value
is very high, the agent should allocate its time for
rush execution of some operators in a plan, despite
of its limited plausibility. On the other hand, if
the urgency is relatively low, the agent may be
able to engage in more deliberate considerations
for the global situation.
In the poster, the design of the simple world we use
will be introduced. Once the urgency value for a goal
in this world is formulated, the last two phases in
the problem solving of the agent, namely the goal
scheduling and the action mode selection, will be
discussed. The final section will describe the current
level of implementation and future directions of our research.
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Short CV
Family name: Tsuchiya
Forename: Takafumi
Education:
1988 B. A. at department of behavioral science,
faculty of letters, Hokkaido University
1990 M. A. at graduate school of behavioral science,
Hokkaido University
Research and professional experience:
1990-1997 Instructor at department of cognitive science,
school of computer and cognitive sciences,
Chukyo University
1993-1994 Visiting researcher at the social science information
technology and department of experimental and occupational,
University of Groningen, the Netherlands
1997-present Lecturer at the department of cognitive science,
school of computer and cognitive sciences,
Chukyo University
Membership of academic societies:
The Japanese cognitive science society
Cognitive science society
Information processing society of Japan
Japan society for software science and technology
Field of study:
a computational model of dialogue and interaction
problem solving
computer support for collective activities
Recent Activities:
Tsuchiya, T., Asano, T., Miyake, E., & Takahashi, K.:
Providing a social-filtering web page for students:
refinement of shared help,
The 2nd international conference proceedings on cognitive science,
pp.890-893(1999).
Ueda, S., Kasahara, M., & Tsuchiya, T.:
A dialogue system to help users to express more about their questions
(in Japanese),
The 59th conference proceedings information processing society of Japan,
pp.401-402(1999).
Tsuchiya, T.:
Poster presentation titled:
Goal scheduling and action selection done by an autonomous agent on the
basis of situational urgency(1999),
The 13th TOYOTA conference on affective minds,