9205668 Maes This is the third year funding of a three-year continuing grant. Intelligent interface agents are computer programs that employ artificial intelligence and other techniques in order to provide expert, autonomous assistance to a user dealing with particular computer applications. This research addresses the question of learning as a method by which an agent can acquire sufficient amounts of information about the user, the application, and the communication and collaboration strategies to be able to empower the user. The goal of this project is to find the necessary and sufficient conditions for the hypothesis to hold that an interface agent can be given access to the information it needs to program itself. The agent is given a minimum of background knowledge and learns appropriate situation-action rules by observing the user's interaction with the application, by receiving feedback from the user about certain rules, and by copying the situation-action rules employed by agents assisting other users in the same application. The project will first develop a generic architecture for building learning interface agents. This will then be used in concrete examples to test the main hypothesis.
