Team Leader: An Approach to Mixed-Initiative Agent Team Management and Evaluation

Abstract

The rapid growth in research and development of agent-based software systems has led to concerns about how human users will control the activities of teams of agents that must actively collaborate. Practical multi-agent systems will often be comprised of small teams of heterogeneous agents, under direct supervision by users acting as "team leaders". This research focused on a number of areas critical to tasking and managing teams of humans and agents, including techniques for agentizing' legacy systems, Human-Computer Interaction techniques for interactively defining tasks and roles and communications between agents, mechanisms for interactively forming and controlling teams of agents as well as summarizing and visualizing agent task status, methods for translating information across different ontologies, and mechanisms for monitoring and controlling agent communications based on semantic content. A key contribution of this work has been the development of an approach to dynamic information sharing among agents on teams, alleviating human managers from the need to coordinate information awareness. The work was demonstrated in a number of large-scale demonstrations including the Coalition Agents experiment (CoAX) and the Mixed-Initiative Agent Team Administration (MIATA) demonstration.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADA412983

Entities

People

  • Alice Mulvehill
  • Brett Benyo
  • David Diller
  • Ed Pattison-gordon
  • Mark Burstein

Organizations

  • BBN Technologies

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Biomedical
  • C4I
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cognitive Science
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Graphical User Interface
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Human-Machine Systems
  • Humanitarian Assistance
  • Information Exchange
  • Information Systems
  • Intelligence Collection
  • Joint Military Activities
  • Military Organizations
  • Multiagent Systems
  • Ontologies

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.