Interface agents as surrogate users
Robert St. Amant · intelligence · 2000
Interactive applications extend human abilities along an enormous number of dimensions. What can we learn from agents that use these same software tools? Artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction have close historical ties, going back to Newell and Simon's work on human problem solving [3], and farther. We see the influence of AI on HCI, for example, in the notion of the user as a rational problemsolving agent and task analysis concepts that match the goals and actions of planning representations. Conversely, user interface issues have given AI developers challenging problems in realistic environments, leading to results in automatic interface adaptation, multi-modal interaction, interface generation, and agent interaction, among a wide range of other areas [2]. The relationship is natural. Both fields are concerned with facilitating the interaction of agents with their environments---humans in software environments, artificial agents in a variety of problem-solving domains. In a sense, agent developers and user interface designers see opposite sides of the same problem. As AI developers, we build better and better agents, driven by the complexity of an environment or problem domain we are