Conscious Learning In An Adaptive Software Agent

This paper describes the \conscious" learning mechanism of an adaptive software agent, Conscious Mattie (CMattie). This conscious software agent takes the role of a departmental seminar organizer. The agent gathers seminar information via email from humans, composes an announcement of the next week's seminars, and mails it to members of a mailing list which she maintains. Through further interaction with seminar organizers, CMattie learns to handle new variations of seminars, such as colloquia. In this paper, the agent's perception and consciousness modules are described. Using a limited capacity global workspace that coordinates with the perception module, CMattie communicates with human seminar organizers. Through such interaction, CMattie gathers missing information and learns new concepts for use in composing the announcements. 4 2 Introduction An autonomous agent [7] is a system situated in, and part of, an environment, which senses that environment, and acts on it, over time, ..