1. <I-N-C-A> and the I-Room
Cut down Version of “Train for Success” Talk – 13-May-2010
An intelligent environment which acts as a knowledge aid to support collaborative operations rooms and team meeting or training spaces
OpenVCE and CoSAR Projects
Open Virtual Collaboration Environment
US Army Research Lab HRED
USJFCOM/JPRC
AIAI, University of Edinburgh
Carnegie Mellon University
University of Virginia
Open University
IHMC, University of West Florida
Perigean Technologies
EADS Innovation/Airbus Industries
Glenkier Distilleries
Metaforic/Slam Games
Austin Tate
AIAI, Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Tate, A., Chen-Burger, Y-H., Dalton, J., Potter, S., Richardson, D., Stader, J., Wickler, G., Bankier, I., Walton, C. and Williams, P.G. (2010) I-Room: A Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp 62-71, July-August 2010, IEEE Computer Society.
I-Room -
The development of a task-orientated Virtual Collaboration Center using intelligent systems technology arose through work on the “Helpful Environment” (Tate, 2006), I-X (“Intelligent Technology”) and more specifically through the use of online collaborative planning and task-support systems for search and rescue teams and emergency response (Wickler et al., 2006).
The I-Room can be used as a mechanism to deliver intelligent systems support to meetings and collaborating groups. In particular, the I Room is designed to draw on I X Technology (Tate, 2000) which provides intelligent and intelligible (to the human participants) planning aids to participants and, through their “I Space” view of those around them, allows them to interact and collaborate with a number of people, and to utilise a range of manual and automated capabilities in a coherent way. The participants share meaningful information about the processes and products they are working on through a common conceptual model called <I N C A> (Tate, 2003).

2. I-Room: A Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction
Operations Centres, Brainstorming Spaces, Team Meeting Rooms, Training and Review Areas

3. An example I-Room as it appears on the VCE region in Second Life and the NewVCE region in the Opensim-based New World Grid (for privately hosted and behind the firewall solutions).
2010

4. Planning, Evaluation Option Argumentation Briefing and Decision Making
Central
Meeting
Area
I-Room arranged as 4 work areas around a central meeting area, specialised to support a range of functions in decsion making, e.g. for operations centres. Using OODA Loop (Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act) basis.
Sensing and
Situation Analysis
Acting, Reacting
and Communication

5. <I-N-C-A> Framework
Common conceptual basis for sharing information on processes and process products
Shared, intelligible to humans and machines, easily communicated, formal or informal and extendible
Set of restrictions on things of interest:
I Issues e.g. what to do? How to do it?
N Nodes e.g. include activities or product parts
C Constraints e.g. state, time, spatial, resource, …
A Annotations e.g. rationale, provenance, reports, …
Shared collaborative processes to manipulate these:
Issue-based sense-making (e.g. gIBIS, 7 issue types)
Activity Planning and Execution (e.g. mixed-initiative planning)
Constraint Satisfaction (e.g. AI and OR methods, simulation)
Note making, rationale capture (QOC), logging, reporting, etc.
Maintain state of current status, models and knowledge
I-X Process Panels (I-P2) use representation and reasoning together with state to present current, context sensitive, options for action
Mixed-initiative collaboration model of “mutually constraining things”

6. I-P2 aim is a Planning, Workflow and Task Messaging “Catch All”
Can take ANY requirement to:
Handle an issue
Perform an activity
Respect a constraint
Note an annotation
Deals with these via:
Manual activity
Internal capabilities
External capabilities
Reroute or delegate to other panels or agents
Plan and execute a composite of these capabilities (I-Plan)
Receives reports and interprets them to:
Understand current status of issues, activities and constraints
Understand current world state, especially status of process products
Support the modification of the plan
Explain or help users control the situation
Copes with partial knowledge of processes and organizations

7. I-Room: Mixed-initiative Collaboration
Truly distributed mixed initiative collaboration and task support is the focus of the I-Room, allowing for the following tasks:
situation monitoring
sense-making
analysis and simulation
planning
option analysis
briefing
decision making
responsive enactment

8. I-Room: Underlying Concepts for Effective Collaboration
Underlying the use of the I-Room for collaboration and its ability to link human participants to a range of computational services and intelligent systems support are the following concepts:
A mixed-initiative collaborative model for refining and constraining processes and products;
Principled communication based on sharing issues, activities/processes, state, event, agents, options, argumentation, rationale, presence information and reports through the <I-N-C-A> ontology;
The use of the <I-N-C-A> ontology also for representing the products that are developed during meetings and through the collaborative process;
The use of I-X Technology and its suite of tools to provide task support;
The use of issue-based argumentation, through the use of the Questions-Options-Criteria (QOC) methodology and links to sense-making tools;
The use of agent presence models as in instant messaging;
The use of I-X “I-Space” to support awareness of agent context, status, relationships within an organisational framework, capabilities and authorities;
The use of an “I-World” of discovery of relevant agents and services, along with their capabilities, authorities and availability;
The use of the “Beliefs-Desires-Intentions” (BDI) model of agents and their relationship to world state, context and other agents.
The use of external shared repositories of processes, products, media and other resources.
These technologies, methodologies and ontologies will form the platform on which the research can be based.