Integrating Context into Intent Recognition Systems

A precursor to social interaction is social understanding. Every day, humans observe each other and on the basis of their observations “read people’s minds,” correctly inferring the goals and intentions of others. Moreover, this ability is regarded not as remarkable, but as entirely ordinary and effortless. If we hope to build robots that are similarly capable of successfully interacting with people in a social setting, we must endow our robots with an ability to understand humans’ intentions. In this paper, we propose a system aimed at developing those abilities in a way that exploits both an understanding of actions and the context within which those