Computational Framework for and the Realization of Cognitive Agents Providing Intelligent Assistance Capabilities

The scope of the presented research covers virtual agents providing intelligent assistance capabilities for accessing and processing information from the Internet, domain specific databases and knowledge repositories. They receive natural language inputs and communicate findings to their users via a set of task oriented interfaces. Cognitive agents are conceived to evolve in a response to the changes of interests, needs and preferences of the users and the alterations in their environment. We present a virtual embodied cognitive agents architecture, and a computational framework that allows their modular and flexible creation, based on a set of components. The framework supports the creation of an environment for multiple agents and provides communication mechanisms, used to share knowledge between the agents. The exemplary assembly of these building blocks to realize smart assistance applications further demonstrates the platform’s capacity to support development, instantiation and evaluation of collaborative cognitive agents. 1 MOTIVATION AND OBJECTIVES Our motivation is to create virtual agents that provide personalized assistance to their users in finding and retrieving information from the Internet and other resources such as domain-specific databases and knowledge repositories. The developed virtual agents represent a growing class of cooperative agents that do not have a physical presence, but nevertheless are equipped with major ingredients of cognition including situated correlates of physical embodiment to become adaptive, cooperative and self improving in a virtual environment, given certain tasks. The design of the agents is partially inspired by embodied cognition originating from interaction-based robotics, transferred to a virtual context[5, 4]. This is persuade in the projects RASCALLI (Responsive Artificial Situated Cognitive Agents that Live and Learn on the Internet) and SELP (Advanced Knowledge Technologies: Grounding, Fusion, Applications). The presented work covers the following topics: development of a computational framework for realization of cognitive agents providing intelligent assistance capabilities, cognitive architecture and modeling, perception and action, reasoning, learning, communication, agent-toagent and agent-to-user interfaces. In the symbolic AI tradition, there has been a substantial work on Internet agents that perform pre-defined tasks on the Internet, includ ing information retrieval and extraction tasks , checking for website updates, doing price comparisons etc. However, such Internet agen ts 1 Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence,A ustria, email: marcin.skowron,joerg.irran,brigitte.krenn@ofai.at 2 http://www.cs. washington.edu/research/softbots relied rather on extensive statistical analysis and on existing search engines than on the usage of cognitive architectures in an attempt to develop adaptive and flexible virtual agents. The Rascalli project aims at extending the state of the art by developing situated cognitive agents which inhabit the Internet environment. The investigation of the added value through the usage of cognitive architectures for improving the agent’s capabilities and the user experience in interaction with that agent is a further objective of the presented work. This is feasible due to the modular approach used in the Rascalli platform, which supports multiple agent architectures and agent definitions, and therefore serves as a testbed for the evaluation and comparison of the agents. The major standards organization in the area of Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is FIPA , which is concerned with the standardization and interoperability of multi-agent systems. JADE 4 and similar FIPA compliant agent platforms offer a strong middleware layer for distributed multi-agent systems, including agent lifecycle management, agent communication, as well as rich graphical tools for agent development but they do not meet major requirements of the RASCALLI platform. While the RASCALLI platform supports the execution of multiple agents, it is not a multi-agent system in the traditional sense, where agents are independent components of a larger application. Instead, Rascalli are complete individual entities that simply happen to exist in the same environment and are intended to communicate with each other. Furthermore, none of the aforementioned agent platforms supports the development style targeted by the RASCALLI platform, where multiple agent architectures and agent definitions, as well as multiple versions of agent components co-exist in a single platform instance. This development style is specifically geared towards research projects experimenting with alternative cognitive architectures, and combining them with a variety of action and perception tools as it is the case with the exemplary applications (see section 6) created and integrated in the Rascalli platform. The RASCALLI approach differs also from existing software systems for cognitive modeling such as AKIRA VI 5 or AmonI. While the latter two provide specific means for modeling cognitive processes, the RASCALLI platform is a more general framework for implementing a variety of different models and architectures. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 describes concepts and design principles of the cognitive agents providing intelligent assistance capabilities. Section 3 introduces the computational 3 http://www.fipa. org 4 http://jade.tilab. com 5 https://sourceforge.net/projects/a-k-i-r-a/ 6 htpp://www.cs. bath.ac. uk/ai/AmonI-sw.html framework for realization of the cognitive agents as implemented in the Rascalli platform. Section 4 provides an overview of a bottomup and top-down cognitive components used in the system. Section 5 introduces the concepts and components implemented in the platform, that are used to create different incarnations of Rascalli agents , presented in section 6. The last section provides the conclusions and presents the future work. 2 CONSTITUTION OF THE AGENTS In the RASCALLI project the creation of virtual agents that provide personalized assistance to users in finding and retrieving information from the Internet and other resources such as knowledge repositories and domain-specific databases is pursued. The set of actions the agents are able to perform includes web and database search mechanisms, techniques for extracting information from social networks and news-feeds, techniques for extracting information from texts, logging of user interactions and recommendation of related content. The agents evolve in response to the changes of interests, needs and preferences of the users and to the alterations in the agents environment. Therefore the agents need a certain degree of autonomy and flexibility in their behavior. To achieve this, the agents have a biologically inspired virtual embodiment consisting of three layers (see Fig. 1), a perception layer with which they perceive (analyse) their environment, a cognitive layer with learning and reasoning capabilities, and an actuator layer which allows them to act on the environment employing a selection of processing tools. Everything outside the agent, including the user, Internet resources, local databases an d other Rascalli agents is considered as a part of the environment. Due to the modular design of the platform (refer to section 3), a cognitive component can be realized using various approaches (refer to section 4) and different agents can be assembled using a selected set of action-perception and user-agent interface components (refer to section 5). Figure 1. Layers of the agents virtual embodiment and the interaction lo p with the environment 3 RASCALLI PLATFORM A COMPUTATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR COGNITIVE AGENTS In the scope of the Rascalli project, various sets of action-perception tools as well as knowledge acquisition, reasoning and decision making mechanisms are being conceptualized, developed and tested. The Rascalli development platform[10] supports a flexible creation of individual virtual agents via assembly from a set of existing software components. The platform allows also multiple instances of agents to be run on a single platform instance, thus different incarnations of virtual agents can be exposed to the same environmental conditions, as well as developed and evaluated in parallel. The Rascalli project provides also several interface modules for the realization of agent-human interaction, including an Embodied Conversational Agent interface and other interfaces described in section 5.7. The interfaces are treated in the Rascalli platform in the same way as the other components. Since the components are isolated building blocks, they can be separately evaluated, according to what information they have gathered, what outputs they have produced to certain tasks or according to the the user satisfaction. Consequently, different system incarnations (including various implementations of a cognitive component) can be assembled and evaluated to find an optimal s t of system components for a given objective (see section 6). The design of the software architecture of the RASCALLI platform is determined by a number of requirements. They stem from the need for distributed development of individual components, the wish to run multiple Rascalli on a single platform, the need for a platform that supports a plug and play approach, and that supports the realization of and experimentation with different cognitive architectures/models/components. We additionally aim at a research setting, where the integration of existing components is preferable to reimplementation, and where system integration is likely to be a technically non-trivial task. The RASCALLI platform supports the implementation of agents of different constitutions, structured in several layers (see Fig.2 for an overview): Figure 2. Rascalli platform and its layers Infrastructure Layer : The infrastructure layer