Austin Tate

IS Journal 2013 Journal Article

Knowledge Systems for Coalition Operations

• Jitu Patel
• Austin Tate
• Niranjan Suri
• James Lawton

Most major military, peacekeeping, and humanitarian operations are now coalition-based and require agility and effective use of limited resources to achieve complex and multiple objectives. This raises many challenges given technical incompatibilities, rules and regulations, as well as cultural norms. This special issue examines the contributions of intelligent systems to help address this important problem domain.

IS Journal 2013 Journal Article

Technological Challenges in Emergency Response [Guest editors' introduction]

• Sharad Mehrotra
• Xiaogang Qiu
• Zhidong Cao
• Austin Tate

The guest editors discuss some recent advances in using intelligent systems for emergency management, as well as remaining technological challenges.

IS Journal 2013 Journal Article

Using Shared Procedural Knowledge for Virtual Collaboration Support in Emergency Response

• Gerhard Wickler
• Austin Tate
• Jeffrey Hansberger

A framework is described for developing and deploying procedural knowledge in emergency situations where collaboration is needed. In this framework, procedural knowledge is represented in a wiki using an informal, textual description that's marked up with formal tags based on the I-N-C-A representation for hierarchical task networks used in AI planning. The tight integration of collaborative editing with deployment is new in this system and advances knowledge engineering for planning domain (procedural) knowledge, which can reduce uncertainty in emergency situations.

IS Journal 2010 Journal Article

I-Room: a Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction

• Austin Tate
• Yun-Heh Chen-Burger
• Jeff Dalton
• Stephen Potter
• David Richardson
• Jussi Stader
• Gerhard Wickler
• Ian Bankier

The I-Room is a virtual environment intended to support a range of collaborative activities, especially those that involve sense making, deliberation, and decision making. The I-Room case studies described in this paper all employ virtual worlds technology to provide this interaction space and show how this can be augmented with external knowledge-based and intelligent systems.

AAAI Conference 2004 System Paper

Intelligent Agents for Coalition Search and Rescue Task Support

• Austin Tate
• Clauirton de Siebra
• Jeffrey M. Bradshaw

The Coalition Search and Rescue Task Support demonstration shows cooperative agents supporting a highly dynamic mission in which AI task planning, inter-agent collaboration, workflow enactment, policy-managed communications, semantic web queries, semantic web services matchmaking and knowledge-based notifications are employed.

AAAI Conference 2000 Conference Paper

O-Plan: A Web-Based AI Planning Agent

• Austin Tate
• and John Levine

In these demonstrations we show O-Plan, an AI planning agent working over the WWW. There are a number of demonstrations ranging from a simple “single shot” generation of Unix systems administration scripts through to comprehensive use of AI technologies across the whole planning lifecycle in military and civilian crisis situations The applications are derived from actual user requirements and domain knowledge. The AI planning technologies demonstrated include: • Domain knowledge elicitation • Rich plan representation and use • Hierarchical Task Network Planning • Detailed constraint management • Goal structure-based plan monitoring • Dynamic issue handling • Plan repair in low and high tempo situations • Interfaces for users with different roles • Management of planning and execution workflow The featured demonstrations, and others, are available at http: //www. aiai. ed. ac. uk/~oplan/isd/

ICAPS Conference 2000 Conference Paper

Using AI Planning Technology for Army Small Unit Operations

• Austin Tate
• John Levine
• Peter Jarvis
• Jeff Dalton 0002

In this paper, we outline the requirements of a planning and decision aid to support US Army small unit operations in urban terrain and show how AI planning technologies can be exploited in that context. The work is a rare example of a comprehensive use of AI technologies across the whole planning lifecycle, set in a realistic application in which the actual user community set the requirements. The phases involved include: • Domain knowledge elicitation • Rich plan representation and use • Hierarchical Task Network Planning • Detailed constraint management • Goal structure-based plan monitoring • Dynamic issue handling • Plan repair in low and high tempo situations • Interfaces for users with different roles • Management of planning and execution workflow

ICAPS Conference 1998 Conference Paper

Generation of Multiple Qualitatively Different Plan Options

• Austin Tate
• Jeff Dalton 0002
• John Levine

COA-ICOA-2COAo3 In this paper, we present a Web-baseddemonstration of a Course of Action (COA)comparison matrix being used as an interface to an O-Plan plan server to explore multiple qualitatively different plan options. The scenario used for this demonstrationis concerned with crisis operations on the island of Pacifica. The COAcomparison matrix allows the user to explore and evaluate several different plan options based on different command-level requirementsand different assumptions about the conditions on the island. This workis part of a larger effort to build a comprehensive mixedinitiative planning system incorporating human users in designateduser roles.

KER Journal 1998 Journal Article

Putting ontologies to use

• Mike Uschold
• Austin Tate

Interest in the nature, development and use of ontologies is becoming increasingly widespread. Since the early nineties, numerous workshops have been held. Representatives from historically separate disciplines concerned with philosophical issues, knowledge acquisition and representation, planning, process management, database schema integration, natural language processing and enterprise modelling, came together to identify a common core of issues of interest. There was highly varied and inconsistent usage of a wide variety of terms, most notably, “ontology”, rendering cross-discipline communication difficult. However, progress was made toward understanding the commonality among the disciplines. Subsequent workshops addressed various aspects of the field, including theoretical issues, methodologies for building ontologies, as well as specific applications in government and industry.

KER Journal 1998 Journal Article

Rationale in planning: causality, dependencies, and decisions

• STEPHEN T. POLYAK
• Austin Tate

Traditional approaches to plan representation have focused on the generation of a sequence of actions and orderings. Knowledge rich models, which incorporate plan rationale, provide benefits to the planning process in a number of ways. The use of rationale in planning is reviewed in terms of causality, dependencies, and decisions. Each dimension addresses practical issues in the planning process, and adds value to the resultant plan. The contribution of this paper is to explore this categorisation, and to motivate the need to explicitly record and represent rationale knowledge for situated, mixed-initiative planning systems.

KER Journal 1998 Journal Article

Roots of SPAR — Shared Planning and Activity Representation

• Austin Tate

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and US Air Force Research Laboratory Planning Initiative (ARPI) has initiated a project to draw on the range of previous work in planning and activity ontologies to create a practically useful Shared Planning and Activity Representation (SPAR) for use in technology and applications projects within their communities. This article describes the previous work which has been used to create the initial SPAR representation. Key examples of the work drawn upon are published in this issue. The paper provides a comprehensive bibliography and related world wide web resources for work in the area of plan, process and activity representation. SPAR is now being subjected to refinement during several review cycles by a number of expert and user panels.

KER Journal 1998 Journal Article

The Process Interchange Format and Framework

• Jintae Lee
• Michael Gruninger
• Yan Jin
• Thomas Malone
• Austin Tate
• GREGG YOST
• OTHER MEMBERS OF THE PIF WORKING GROUP

This document provides the specification of the Process Interchange Format (PIF) version 1.2. The goal of this work is to develop an interchange format to help automatically exchange process descriptions among a wide variety of business process modelling and support systems such as workflow software, flow charting tools, planners, process simulation systems and process repositories. Instead of having to write ad hoc translators for each pair of such systems each system will only need to have a single translator for converting process descriptions in that system into and out of the common PIF format. Then any system will be able to automatically exchange basic process descriptions with any other system. This document describes the PIF-CORE 1.2, i.e. the core set of object types (such as activities, agents and prerequisite relations) that can be used to describe the basic elements of any process. The document also describes a framework for extending the core set of object types to include additional information needed in specific applications. These extended descriptions are exchanged in such a way that the common elements are interpretable by any PIF translator, and the additional elements are interpretable by any translator that knows about the extensions. The PIF format was developed by a working group including representatives from several universities and companies, and has been used for experimental automatic translations among systems developed independently at three of these sites. This document is being distributed in the hopes that other groups will comment upon the interchange format proposed here, and that this format (or future versions of it) may be useful to other groups as well. The PIF Document 1.0 was released in December 1994, and the current document reports the revised PIF that incorporate the feedback received since then.

ICAPS Conference 1996 Conference Paper

Representing Plans as a Set of Constraints - the <I-N-OVA> Model

• Austin Tate

This paper presents an approach to representing and manipulating plans based on a model of plans as a set of constraints. The [I-N-OVA] (Issues -- Nodes -- Orderings/Variables/Auxiliary) model is used to characterise the plan representation used within O-Plan and to relate this work to emerging formal analyses of plans and planning. This synergy of practical and formal approaches can stretch the formal methods to cover realistic plan representations as needed for real problem solving, and can improve the analysis that is possible for production planning systems.

ICAPS Conference 1994 Conference Paper

Synthesizing Protection Monitors from Causal Structure

• Glen A. Reece
• Austin Tate

Protection monitors synthesized from plan causal structure provide execution systems with information necessaryto detect potential failures early duringexecution. By detecting early, the execution system is able to address these problems and keep the execution on track. Whenthe execution system finds that the necessaryrepairs are beyondits capabilities, early detection gives the planning system additional time to suggest a repair. This paper discusses howprotection monitorsare synthesizeddirectly from plan causal structure, and the options which are available to an execution systemwhenprotection violations occur.

AAAI Conference 1994 Conference Paper

The Use of Condition Types to Restrict Search in an AI Planner

• Austin Tate

Condition satisfaction in planning has received a great deal of experimental and formal attention. A “Truth Criterion” lies at the heart of many planners and is critical to their capabilities and performance. However, there has been little study of ways in which the search space of a planner incorporating such a Truth Criterion can be guided. The aim of this document is to give a description of the use of condition “type” information to inform the search of an AI planner and to guide the production of answers by a planner’ s truth criterion algorithm. The authors aim to promote discussion on the merits or otherwise of using such domain-dependent condition type restrictions as a means to communicate valuable information from the domain writer to a general purpose domain-independent planner ‘.

ICAPS Conference 1994 Conference Paper

The Use of Optimistic and Pessimistic Resource Profiles to Inform Search in an Activity Based Planner

• Brian Drabble
• Austin Tate

Resourcereasoninghas beenat the heart of many of the successful AI based schedulingsystemsyet no attempt has been madeto integrate the best techniques from scheduling with the best techniquesfrom AI activity based planning. This paperpresents a set of incremental algorithms whichcreate two separate profiles to represent the optimistic and pessimistic use of resources within an activity plan. Theseallow the planner to ensure that there is a feasible assignmentof resources available within any plan state being considered. The paper demonstrates howthese profiles canbe usedto track the usageof a variety of different resource types and howthey can be, ~d to provide detailed and relevant information whet, a resourceconstraint conflict is detected.

AIJ Journal 1991 Journal Article

O-Plan: The open planning architecture

• Ken Currie
• Austin Tate

ICAPS Conference 1990 Conference Paper

Interacting with an intelligent planning system using English sentences

• B. Crabtree
• N. Pirie
• Richard S. Crouch
• Stephen G. Pulman
• D. C. Moffat
• Graeme D. Ritchie
• Austin Tate

ICAPS Conference 1990 Conference Paper

Using domain knowledge to restrict search in an AI planner

• Ken Currie
• Austin Tate

KER Journal 1987 Journal Article

A framework for technology transfer within the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute

• Mark Drummond
• Ann Macintosh
• Austin Tate
• Dave Barlow
• Mark Greenwood

The University of Edinburgh established the Artificial Institute (AIAI) in 1984 with the objective of transferring the technologies of artificial intelligence from the academic research environment to the practical worlds of commerce, government and industry.

KER Journal 1984 Journal Article

A Review of knowledge-based planning techniques

• Austin Tate

Summary Planning systems have been an active research topic within Artificial Intelligence for over two decades. There have been a number of techniques developed during that period which still form an essential part of many of today's planners. This paper introduces the techniques, attempts to classify some of the important research themes in AI planning and describes their historical development.