AAAI Spring Symposium on Human Interaction with Autonomous Systems in Complex Environments

Symposium Overview

Autonomous systems can greatly reduce human workload in complex environments by handling routine or cognitively challenging operations. Such autonomous systems, however change the nature of human tasks and can introduce new risks. Thus, a key question for this symposium is: How do we make people more effective and safe in performing tasks in cooperation with an autonomous system? It is our view that effective human interaction with autonomous systems requires more than just good user interface design. It involves substantial challenges in the design of the autonomous systems themselves and in the representation and use of the cognitive models underpinning human interaction with autonomous systems. More specifically, how does the need to interact with people affect design requirements for autonomous agent functions such as planning, scheduling and intent inference. Human-autonomy interaction raises issues such as how to accept task inputs from humans, how to adjust the level of autonomy and/or changethe distribution of roles and responsibilities between autonomous systems and human, how to model humans and their tasks and to what level of details, how to facilitate human understanding of the goals, tasks and contexts of autonomous systems to reduce the potential that anomalies would lead to unexpected responses from the system or inappropriate responses by the human.

The objective of this symposium is to encourage people doing research in autonomous systems to interact with researchers in human-computer interaction. We are interested in applications to environments in which people interact with autonomous systems regularly and in-depth. We call these human-centered autonomous systems and they include autonomous control of buildings or spacecraft, robots that interact with people, and software for assisting complex human tasks, such as logistics planning.

Accepted Papers:

Click here for a list of accepted papers

Tentative Schedule:

Click here for a tentative symposium schedule

Program Committee:

David Kortenkamp, NASA Johnson Space Center/Metrica Inc. (co-chair)

Mike Freed, NASA Ames Research Center (co-chair)

Michael Cleary, Draper Laboratory

Debra Schreckenghost, NASA JSC/Metrica Inc.

Reid Simmons, Carnegie Mellon University

David Woods, Ohio State University

More information:

For more information about the AAAI Spring Symposium Series go to

AAAI Spring Symposium 2003