News

Extended deadline for submissions: December 12th, 2008

List of accepted papers now available.

Introduction

Increasingly systems have the ability to undertake decisions and execute actions without reference to people in either the choice of decision or the course of action. Additionally such systems have the ability to work both alongside and with people. However how these systems manage and execute their work alongside people and with people and communicate and interact with those people is a subject of current research concern. Issues arise such as how do people who are in some sense part of a system that includes "autonomous" components communicate, coordinate and collaborate together to avoid conflict, failure or worse. Similarly, issues concern the recognition and communication of intent, and implication with respect to human-system interaction. Extending considerations to system - system interaction when we create system that must communicate, coordinate and collaborate with each other. These systems have to be designed but their behaviours and ongoing interactions are often not well understood and/or evolve as the systems develop. Examples of these systems are developing in many areas including health, agriculture, transport, energy and defence. The focus of this research is to bring together researchers from different disciplines who have interests in understanding, designing, deploying and assessing the such systems from the perspective of their interaction with people and how they communicate, coordinate and collaborate. Drawing out such issues as awareness, understanding, sharing and joint activity, and considering such aspects as intentions, states, goals, and resources, through mechanisms such as negotiation, planning, task-allocation and task sharing.

This is a timely workshop and IUI is the main area that offers the chance for these different communities to come together to focus on the nature and form of human interaction with complex, networked and autonomous systems. (Note: because the boundaries between these systems are blurred we are not wishing to exclude any and while there are distinctions we do not want to use those to divide or exclude possible attendees).

Objectives

The following are the workshop objectives:

• Bring together a community of researchers and practitioners to develop the research agenda needed to enhance human interaction with increasingly powerful and independent intelligent systems e.g. sensors networks, autonomous systems, agents and robotic systems.
• This community will include but not be limited to those with interest in decision-making, human computer interaction, collaborative work, human-robot/agent interaction and sensor networks.
• To define and harness the potential synergies between isolated communities of interest such that they can collaborate to identify and tackle the higher-level problems/research questions relating both to the current generation of complex, powerful, independent, intelligent systems and the next.
• To identify specific opportunities for exchange between PIM researchers and HCI researchers.

Potential Participants

The workshop will be of interest to researchers and practitioners from a number of communities. In particular we welcome and will attract attendees from different communities including those working in:

• Human computer interaction,
• Intelligent systems and decision making,
• Sensors and networks
• Human - Robot/Agent interaction
• Collaborative systems.