Comparability is Key to Assess Affective Architectures

Authors: Stefan Rank & Paolo Petta
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Date: 2006-04-19

Presented at ACE2006, Vienna, Austria (EU) • 2006-04-19.

Contents

disclaimer/acknowledgements: see last slide.

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What Are We Doing?

“Theories of human emotion provide essential insight into the design and control of intelligent entities in general”

Speaker's notes

I will not present a specific agent archictecture today but I rather like to take a step back and ask some questions that pertain to all architectures. start with a quote.

models of emotion that can be used in a computer system. supposed to help for example in allocating and focusing mental resources

Take-Home Message

Open questions:

Detailed scenarios of use

  • Help to compare architectures targetting different functionalities
  • Explicate the functional role of emotion

Speaker's notes

necessary to provide detailed scenarios of use. <s>

make explicit what kind of emotional functionality is wanted in an agent.

Labelling with emotional terms

What parts are there?

Speaker's notes

interaction of processes as corresponding to specific phenomena

What is a Model For?

Models can only be understood (and evaluated) with respect to a given level of description and associated criteria

Main advantages of computational models?

Speaker's notes

A model can only capture part of the system it wants to model. The missing pieces are often implicit, and they need to be - to constrain complexity.

Just as the systems they model, the models can only be understood (and evaluated) with respect to a given level of description and a specific set of criteria associated with that level. [CleeremansFrench1996] (chicken squawking example?)

A computational model is forced to provide mechanisms, but it is not automatically an adequate explanatory model.

UNUSED IN TALK (also [CleeremansFrench1996]):

Two types of explanatory models:

  • use the same conceptual elements that are appropriate for describing phenomena as the representational and processing medium
  • connect to a lower level of description

Functions of models:

  1. simple existence proof
  2. demonstrate new capabilities
  3. unify an existing body of empirical and theoretical research (example: Soar)
  4. probing and prediction (specify the criteria for testing the model)
  5. interactive modification

The Scenario-based Approach

Emotion: What are situations / phenomena that we target?

Basis for asking: What are the functionalities wanted?

Speaker's notes

Scenario-based design and evaluation is a technique of usability engineering. Its purpose is to capture the relevant details of the situations you want to test a system in.

For emotion models this could be the details of the phenomena that the model is supposed to model. You can regard human emotions (or maybe idealised human emotion and intelligenct) as the system that we aspire to understand; but the model is targeted towards a specific subset of this.

Scenario-based Comparisons

What is a Scenario then?

A point in the niche space for affective agents

Possible purpose and environment of use

The End

Thank you for your attention!

Questions?

Or Answers? • How do you justify using emotion terms? • Are scenarios helpful for bridging disciplines?

The following slides contain anticipated questions (AQ).

AQ: Not Enough Detail

But there is not enough detail in such a scenario, it is not formal enough, to allow productive comparisons?

Scenarios are not intended to be formal verification tools, but should serve as a coordination tool for research efforts.

As such, they should not be too detailed, but iteratively adapted or spawned.

Disclaimer and Acknowledgments

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References

[CleeremansFrench1996](1, 2) Cleeremans A., French R.M.: From Chicken Squawking To Cognition: Levels of Description and the Computational Approach in Psychology, Psychologica Belgica, 36(1-2):5-29, 1996.