MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

DISTINGUISHED LECTURER SERIES

DATE: February 16, 1995
TIME: 3:15-3:40pm Refreshments
Lecture: 3:30pm

Title: Collaborative Systems

Professor Barbara Grosz
Division of Applied Sciences Harvard University

A central challenge for computer science and engineering in the next decade is to create the scientific and technological base for easy-to-use, large-scale information systems. The capability to collaborate with users and other systems is essential for these systems to be able to assist users in finding the information they need and solving the problems they have. If the national information infrastructure is to be an information superhighway and not merely a gigabyte superhighway, it must incorporate collaborative systems. In this talk, I will argue that collaboration must be designed into systems from the start; it cannot be patched on. After describing the main features of collaborative activity, I will describe the SharedPlan model of plans for collaborative action. This model has been used to provide an important element of discourse context for utterance interpretation and generation. I will briefly describe recent work in which Lochbaum shows that the intentional structure of dialogue may be modelled by SharedPlans; this approach enables a more principled treatment of a variety of dialogue types than previous approaches.