EE Graduate Seminar

Intelligent Agents in the OntoAgent Cognitive Architecture

Professor Sergei Nirenburg
Director, Institute for Language and Information Technologies
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

11:30am-12:45pm Friday 30 September 2011, ITE 231

OntoAgent is a constantly evolving cognitive architecture that facilitates development of and experimentation with artificial intelligent agents (ontoagents). Distinguishing characteristics of Ontoagents include the following.

• They model human information processing capabilities by simulating conscious perception and action, which involves reasoning and decision-making;
• They are intended to operate in a hybrid network of human and artificial agents; and
• They incorporate: (a) an ontological world model and a memory (fact repository) of instances of ontological objects, events and properties; (b) OntoSem, a natural language processing module that supports two-way translation between texts (including dialog turns) and their semantic and discourse/pragmatic meanings; (c) a goal- and plan-oriented reasoning module; (d) a decision theory for choosing goals, plans and individual actions that relies on knowledge (beliefs) about self, other agents, the ontological world model, the current world state and memory of past world states and past actions; (e) a capability for verbal, mental and simulated physical action; (f) (optionally) a physiological model, making them what we call double agents with simulated bodies as well as simulated minds and providing an additional channel of perception; and (g) (optionally) personality traits, preferences and psychological states that influence their overtly perceived or subconscious preferences in decision-making.

OntoAgent has so far provided the basis for two proof-of-concept systems:

• Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) modeling a patient and a tutor to help training in medical diagnostics and treatment; and
• CLinicians ADdvisor (CLAD) assisting clinicians by reducing their cognitive load.

This talk will give a brief introduction to OntoAgent functionalities implemented in MVP and CLAD.

Professor Nirenburg has worked in the areas of cognitive systems, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing (NLP) for over 30 years. His professional interests include developing computational models of human cognitive capabilities and implementing them in hybrid-engine models of societies of human and computer agents; computational studies of meaning in natural languages; and representation and management of knowledge about the world and about language. He is Member of the Intl Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) and Honorary Editor of Machine Translation (served as Editor-in-Chief in 1987-96). He has been Program Committee Chair for: Machine Translation Summit III (Washington, DC, 1991), the Conference on Applied NLP sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics (Seattle, WA, 2000), and COLING 2004 in Geneva, Switzerland. He served as a director of two NATO-sponsored Advanced Studies Institutes on Language Engineering for Lesser-Studied Languages (Ankara, Turkey, 2000 and Batumi, Georgia, 2007).

Host: Professor Joel Morris