Philip E. Agre

AIJ Journal 1995 Journal Article

Computational research on interaction and agency

• Philip E. Agre

Recent research in artificial intelligence has developed computational theories of agents' involvements in their environments. Although inspired by a great diversity of formalisms and architectures, these research projects are unified by a common concern: using principled characterizations of agents' interactions with their environments to guide analysis of living agents and design of artificial ones. This article offers a conceptual framework for such theories, surveys several other fields of research that hold the potential for dialogue with these new computational projects, and summarizes the principal contributions of the articles in this special double volume. It also briefly describes a case study in these ideas—a computer program called Toast that acts as a short-order breakfast cook. Because its designers have discovered useful structures in the world it inhabits, Toast can employ an extremely simple mechanism to decide what to do next.

AIJ Journal 1993 Journal Article

Interview with Allen Newell

• Philip E. Agre

AAAI Conference 1992 Conference Paper

Cultural Support for Improvisation

• Philip E. Agre

We present a novel object-centered formalization of action which allows us to define an interesting class of tasks, called cooking tasks, which can be performed without backtracking. Since backtracking is unnecessary, actions can be selected incrementally using a greedy method without having to precompute a plan. Such an approach is efficient and rapidly adjusts to unforeseen circumstances. Our argument is that cooking tasks are widely encountered in everyday life because of the special properties of a given culture’ s artifacts. In other words, culture has structured the world so as to make it easier to live in. We present an implementation of these ideas, experimental results, and control experiments using a standard nonlinear planner.

AIJ Journal 1990 Journal Article

Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication

• Philip E. Agre

AAAI Conference 1987 Conference Paper

Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity

• Philip E. Agre

AI has generally interpreted the organized nature of everyday activity in terms of plan-following. Nobody could doubt that people often make and follow plans. But the complexity, uncertainty, and immediacy of the real world require a central role for moment-to-moment improvisation. But before and beneath any planning ahead, one continually decides what to do now. Investigation of the dynamics of everyday routine activity reveals important regularities in the interaction of very simple machinery with its environment. We have used our dynamic theories to design a program, called Pengi, that engages in complex, apparently planful activity without requiring explicit models of the world.

ECAI Conference 1985 Conference Paper

The Mechanic's Mate

• J. Michael Brady
• Philip E. Agre