I have a solid idea of the unique contribution I would like to present and at IUI and look foward to doing the research on it. Primarly it should be a presentation of the agent design tool and a user study to back it up. The study would be the standard use to the tool to make an agent that does this kind of thing. I would like to devise a metric by which we can automatically rate the quality of the agents the users generate and produce a numeric quantitative evaluation. I also think a comparison using such a system against another design methodology would be in order. I would recommend testing against FSM since they are commonly used by most of the other agent design systems. It shouldn’t be that hard to produce a system that can do both subsumption and FSM. I would like to continue some of the work I read last week and evaluate how much the users “trust” the agents they produced and see what there confidence levels looked like. This concept of trust might prove important given that we would like to submit DASSIE as a training tool for potentially life threating situations. I will need to check our IRB paperwork on what questions we can ask. Finally the work presented here regarding providing the users with rich levels of feedback was very interesting and I would also like to integrate some of it. I feel like we could provide a sort of live demo of the agent that would provide a real time marking of which state is active while the agent moves through the world. If possible it would be nice give the participants the results of the quantitative analysis at this point as well. The participants could then use this to edit there agent design. It would I think be interesting to run participants through both with and without this additional feedback.
Also there are demos scheduled for 2:00 tomorrow thursday.