Reports of the AAAI 2010 Conference Workshops

Reports Reports of the AAAI 2010 Conference Workshops David W. Aha, Mark Boddy, Vadim Bulitko, Artur S. d’Avila Garcez, Prashant Doshi, Stefan Edelkamp, Christopher Geib, Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, Robert P. Goldman, Alon Halevy, Pascal Hitzler, Charles Isbell, Darsana Josyula, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Kristian Kersting, Maithilee Kunda, Luis C. Lamb, Bhaskara Marthi, Keith McGreggor, Lilyana Mihalkova, Vivi Nastase, Sriraam Natarajan, Gregory Provan, Anita Raja, Ashwin Ram, Mark Riedl, Stuart Russell, Ashish Sabharwal, Jan-Georg Smaus, Gita Sukthankar, Karl Tuyls, and Ron van der Meyden n The AAAI-10 workshop program was held AI and Fun Sunday and Monday, July 11–12, 2010, at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. Interactive entertainment has become a dominant force in the The AAAI-10 workshop program included 13 entertainment sector of the global economy. In 2000, John Laird workshops covering a wide range of topics in and Michael van Lent justified interactive entertainment as a artificial intelligence. The titles of the work - domain of study in AI when they posited that computer games shops were AI and Fun; Bridging the Gap Between Task and Motion Planning; Collabo - could act as test beds for achieving human-level intelligence in ratively Built Knowledge Sources and Artificial computers, leveraging the fidelity of their simulations of real- Intelligence; Goal-Directed Autonomy; Intelli - world dynamics. There is an additional perspective on AI for gent Security; Interactive Decision Theory and games: increasing the engagement and enjoyment of the play - Game Theory; Metacognition for Robust Social er. This perspective is consistent with the perspective of com - Systems; Model Checking and Artificial Intelli - puter game developers. For them, AI is a tool in the arsenal of gence; Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reason - the game to be used in lieu of real people when no one is avail - ing; Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition; Sta - able for a given role. Examples of such roles are opponents, tistical Relational AI; Visual Representations and Reasoning; and Abstraction, Reformula - companions, and nonplay characters (NPCs) in roles that are tion, and Approximation. This article presents not fun to play such as shopkeepers, farmers, and victims; cin - short summaries of those events. ematographer; dungeon master; plot writer; or game designer. Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. ISSN 0738-4602 WINTER 2010 95 Reports As we move down this list, the computational sys - While we are not ready to formally define the tem is charged with progressively more responsi - term fun , we can—and should—use it as a call to bility for providing a user with a fun experience. arms for an investigation into core research on But what is fun? We seem to know it when we intelligent systems that reason about and manage see it, but fun is also highly subjective. Can we the quality of human experiences both in a variety computationally model fun? Can intelligent sys - of domains—including many beyond games, such tems learn and utilize models of fun, player prefer - as education, training, and health—and in a vari - ences, storytelling, and so on, to affect human ety of computer-mediated experiences such as sto - experiences? If so, what would this enable with rytelling, interactive drama and theater, serious respect to increased engagement, enjoyment, or games, mixed-reality environments and virtual new forms of computer-mediated interactive expe - cinematography. While fun can be subjective, riences? What are the potential ways forward? To progress can be made through study of related, begin to address these questions, we invited 11 objectively measurable phenomena: engagement, research groups to present on their work and to enjoyment, immersion, flow, replayability, moti - help shed light on the questions from a number of vation, and others yet to be identified. Finally, we perspectives. We explicitly did not ask for papers, note the strong potential for societal impact but instead asked that each group present on their through the domains that can be affected as well as perspective on AI approaches to fun, to address the insight into the basic questions of what drives us questions above, and to speculate on the future. and how we can computationally model and auto - The presentations roughly clustered into four matically reason about it. themes: (1) Player modeling and learning from Mark Riedl, Charles Isbell, Ashwin Ram, and humans, featuring presentations on how to learn Vadim Bulitko served as cochairs of this workshop. models of players, customize game play experi - No technical report was issued. ence, and make inferences about what humans like to do. (2) Virtual and real humans, featuring pre - Bridging the Gap Between sentations on virtual humans in mixed-reality game environments, modeling human improvisa - Task and Motion Planning tional actors for the purposes of building better Task-level planning of the sort typically studied by interactive experiences, and agents that express the AI and planning communities has historically curiosity. (3) Storytelling and discourse, featuring been quite separate from motion planning as stud - presentations on the question of whether we can ied by roboticists. There is an increasing belief that achieve the dream of the Holodeck, how interac - it is both necessary and useful for a tighter cou - tive storytelling might reinforce cognitive percep - pling between these levels. From the perspective of tion of engagement, and how computational sys - task planning, motion planning can be viewed as tems can mediate virtual experiences through providing geometric constraints and heuristics, automated cinematography. (4) Making learning and therefore information about the feasibility and AI fun, featuring presentations on the question of costs of higher-level actions. From a motion plan - how to engage learners in AI courses with virtual ning perspective, task planners allow taking advan - worlds and robotics. tage of the rich combinatorial structure that exists In addition to the four themes, we invited three in the configuration spaces that arise when, for experts from a disparate set of industries to talk example, manipulating several objects. about challenges and opportunities for AI and fun: The workshop featured talks from diverse areas. Miguel Encarnacao, director of emerging technol - There were several presentations on particular for - ogy innovation at Humana, Inc.; Joe Marks, vice malisms for combining the levels of planning from president of Disney Research; and Bob Sottilare, the perspectives of classical planning, motion chief technology officer of the U.S. Army Simula - planning, POMDPs, search-based planning, and tion and Training Technology Center. While it temporal logic-based constraints. There were also would seem that there is little in common with presentations on robotic applications and open training warfighters, making people healthy, and source software, as well as fast GPU implementa - entertaining people in theme parks, a consensus tions of motion planners. emerged that fun is important for motivating peo - Several common themes emerged from the pre - ple to learn, proactively maintain their health, and sentations and discussion. There was a general create brand loyalty. There was also a call for more consensus that pure low-level motion planning in research into natural forms of human-computer configuration space was fairly well solved for prob - communication. Most notably, all three domains lems of moderate dimensionality, and that a prin - cited scalability—more people, more personaliza - cipled approach to coupling with higher-level con - tion, longer experience durations, longitudinal straints and goals was the next step. There were a interactions—as a primary bottleneck that required variety of opinions, however, on the form that this creative automated intelligence. coupling should take, ranging from hierarchical 96 AI MAGAZINE Reports approaches that tackle the different levels in con - shop, the presented papers address a diverse set of cert, to approaches based on finding a good dis - problems and resources. Some papers explored the cretization or summary of lower-level state, but process and result of combining different then planning independently. Finally, many par - resources, extracting and formalizing knowledge ticipants stressed the need for common bench - from structured, semistructured or unstructured marks and representations, so that the different sources, harnessing people power and learning approaches could be compared. from them how to automatically generate and The workshop was organized by Maxim enhance knowledge repositories. The two invited Likhachev, Bhaskara Marthi, Conor McGann, and talks explored in more detail two of the workshop David E. Smith. The papers of the workshop were themes. Henry Lieberman (Massachusetts Institute published as AAAI Technical Report WS-10-01. of Technology Media Laboratory) presented work developing a platform for knowledge acquisition and usage from expert users, built upon experience Collaboratively Built Knowledge with eliciting information from nonexperts in a Sources and Artificial Intelligence collaborative manner, and Lenhart Schubert (Uni - versity of Rochester) explored the usage of knowl - Until recently, the AI, and in particular the natural edge extracted from general text for formal infer - language processing (NLP), communities have ence,

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