2010 Linden Prize Application Title: I-Room: a virtual space for intelligent interaction Summary (max. 200 words): An I-Room provides a virtual space for collaborations such as team meetings, immersive training and event management. It is designed to be rapidly deployable, and to provide a robust and persistent alternative to physical operations rooms for geographically dispersed teams. An I-Room supports various communications mechanisms, and can connect with web-based intelligent planning and task-support systems to actively support meetings and coordinate activity. A 'helper' object placed in the I-Room mediates with the capabilities provided by this architecture, allowing, for example, topic relevant knowledge bases and natural language generation capabilities to support specific tasks within the space. As well as its main use for emergency response or the management of large-scale public events, I-Rooms have also been applied to multi-media product development by an international games development team and to promote the "virtual world of whisky" by providing mixed-reality tutored scotch whisky tasting events. A demonstration I-Room shows examples of shared information access via the web (video feeds, weather screens, Twitter feed on nominated search tags), and intelligent systems for meeting support. I-Rooms are a contribution towards fulfilling the vision of "The Helpful Environment". Description (600 words): Watch a short video introducing the collaborative systems research being undertaken using I-Rooms in Virtual Worlds: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LQEDN-S8Pw Watch two videos of an I-Room in use in practical applications: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFvVvqNtuJc (Slam Games I-Room) * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22pDiEdG7Vw (Virtual World of Whisky Tutorial Room) Papers describing I-Rooms and their applications (PDF via http://openvce.net/2010-linden-prize-iroom) * Tate, A., Potter, S. and Dalton, J. (2009), I-Room: a Virtual Space for Emergency Response for the Multinational Planning Augmentation Team, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Knowledge Systems for Coalition Operations (KSCO-2009) (Lawton, J., Patel, J. and Tate. A. eds.), Chilworth Manor, Southampton, UK, 31 March-1 April 2009. * Tate, A., Chen-Burger, Y-H., Dalton, J., Potter, S., Richardson, D., Stader, J., Wickler, G., Bankier, I., Walton, C. and William, P.G. (2010) I-Room: A Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction * Hansberger, J., Tate, A., Moon, B. and Cross, R. (2010), Cognitively Engineering a Virtual Collaboration Environment for Crisis Response, Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Working. (CSCW 2010 2009), Savannah, Georgia, USA, 6-10 February 2010. I-Rooms are available in Second Life and Opensim. An I-Room provides a two-storey building with a central area and four work zones, designed for collaborative and brain-storming style meetings. An I-Room can be used as a rapidly deployed operations centre for example. Plenty of wall space is available for displays and gadgets. The I-Room can be linked to intelligent planning and task-support systems via an "I-Room Helper" agent. , a powerful - and human intelligible - conceptual model for knowledge sharing in a cooperative task-orientated environment, is underpins the use of intelligent systems. The I-Room style buildings are used in the I-X/I-Room research on intelligent collaborative and task support environments at AIAI, The University of Edinburgh. Potential Applications: * Virtual collaboration centre * Business teleconferencing * Team meetings for projects, products or reviews * Product help desks * Design-to-product - product lifecycle workflow support * Environmental, building and plant monitoring centre * Health and safety at work, disability awareness * Intelligent tutors, guides and greeters * Educational and tutoring rooms * Active demonstration pavilions An example I-Room in use for the "Whole of Society Crises Response" (WoSCR) Community is available for demonstration, to show the public what is being created, and to elicit feedback. The I-Room 3D models, scripts and web applications are all released in open source form to encourage their use by others. The modular and adaptable I-Room 3D building model and all technical facilities within the virtual worlds and on supporting web sites are available as open source assets and software. Demonstrations for new applications can be created using the OpenVCE.net facilities and the Vue and VCE regions in Second Life. The I-X helper agent running within the "Polycom Phone" object in the I-Room can support meetings, with agenda and minuting capabilities. The helper can also control objects in the virtual world by being given a capability and communication description, which it can then use to communicate, control and respond to the object through chat channels. The current I-Room helper commands available are listed at: http://openvce.net/iroom-helper I-Room technical web site: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/i-room/ Underlying artificial intelligence planning and task support technology: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/plan/ Linden Prize Relevance The I-Room demonstrates how web and virtual worlds technology can be linked to support teams working together to protect life and for the benefit of mankind, and has potential in a wide range of collaborative and social applications. Prize funds would be used to facilitate international mixed-reality events to promote the vision of "The Helpful Environment" and the role of virtual space and intelligent interactive I-Rooms in this. SLurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/VCE/128/80/22 Project Dates: Ongoing Biography of Creator(s): Prof Austin Tate holds the Chair in Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Edinburgh and is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the University. He helped form AIAI in 1984 and since that time has led its efforts to transfer the technologies and methods of artificial intelligence and knowledge systems into commercial, governmental and academic applications throughout the world. He holds degrees in Computer Studies (B.A. Lancaster, 1972) and Machine Intelligence (Ph.D. Edinburgh, 1975). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland's National Academy), and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence amongst other honours. He is a professionally Chartered Engineer. Prof. Tate's research interests are in the use of rich process and plan representations along with tools that can utilize these representations to support planning and activity management. He pioneered the early, now widely used and deployed, approaches to hierarchical planning and constraint satisfaction in the Interplan, Nonlin, O-Plan and I-Plan planning systems. His recent work on "I-X" is concerned with supporting collaboration between human and system agents to perform cooperative tasks in a "Helpful Environment". Prof. Tate was the Edinburgh PI in the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in the UK. He also led the US DARPA funded Coalition Agent eXperiment (CoAX) project involving some 30 organizations in 4 countries over a 3 year period. His work is being applied to search and rescue and emergency response tasks. His internationally sponsored research work is focused on the use of advanced knowledge and planning technologies, and collaborative systems especially using virtual worlds. Along with his avatar, Ai Austin, he leads the Virtual University of Edinburgh, Vue, a virtual educational and research institute bringing together those interested in the use of virtual worlds for teaching, research and outreach. Prof. Tate is on the Senior Advisory Board for IEEE Intelligent Systems journal and is a member of the editorial board of a number of other journals Documentation URLs: http://openvce.net/2010-linden-prize-iroom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LQEDN-S8Pw http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2009/2009-ksco-tate-iroom-eresponse.pdf http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/i-room/ References: jeff.hansberger@us.army.mil patrick.williams@eads.com djcr@ed.ac.uk Testimonials chris.walton@metaforic.com ian@whiskyshop.com timothy.bacon@jfcom.mil