The "Living" Room

By Stephanie E. August

Abstract

This case study analyzes the reasoning processes and types of information that we need to embed in collaborative software systems in order for these systems to demonstrate intelligent behavior and allow us to interact with them in a natural way. The central character of the case, Kate, is a college student who lives in an “intelligent” dorm room that converses with her as a friend would. Developed to introduce the ideas of collaboration and natural language understanding in an upper-division course in artificial intelligence, the case can be adapted for non-technical audiences for use in developing critical thinking skills.

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Date Posted

09/05/2008

Overview

Objectives

Map words to a smaller set of primitives or to the ideas intended behind the words.
Make causal connections.
Recognize scripts in text.
Identify goals and plans.
Analyze a speech act.
Understand how expectations guide processing.
Identify ways in which a machine or software program can respond that a human would interpret as a display of emotion.
Recognize instances of collaboration in software and interactive devices.
Identify some of the issues related to human/machine collaboration.

Keywords

Artificial intelligence; natural language understanding; critical thinking; collaboration; knowledge representation; pervasive computing; collaborative computing; collaborative software systems; reasoning processes; discourse

Subject Headings

Computer Science

Linguistics

EDUCATIONAL LEVEL

Undergraduate lower division, Undergraduate upper division

FORMAT

PDF

TOPICAL AREAS

N/A

LANGUAGE

English

TYPE/METHODS

Discussion

Teaching Notes & Answer Key

Teaching Notes

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Answer Key

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