Utility Theory-Based User Models for Intelligent Interface Agents

An underlying problem of current interface agent research is the failure to adequately address effective and efficient knowledge representations and associated methodologies suitable for modeling the users' interactions with the system. These user models lack the representational complexity to manage the uncertainty and dynamics involved in predicting user intent and modeling user behavior. A utility theory-based approach is presented for effective user intent prediction by incorporating the ability to explicitly model users' goals, the uncertainty in the users' intent in pursuing these goals, and the dynamics of users' behavior. We present an interface agent architecture, CIaA, that incorporates our approach and discuss the integration of CIaA with three disparate domains — a probabilistic expert system shell, a natural language input database query system, and a virtual space plane —that are being used as test beds for our interface agent research.