Interaction, planning and motivation

This chapter deals with three key issues related to designing and building intelligent agents. Firstly, determination of aims and objectives at any given time of an intelligent agent, followed by planning a series of actions to achieve these aims and objectives. And finally agents interaction with humans and other software agents to complete the objectives. The above issues are discussed under the heading of motivation, planning and interaction. Motivation as an area of study is important in understanding human and animal behavior. Also, from a computer science perspective, it could offer a substantially higher level of control than is currently available. Furthermore, planning is a sub-field of AI research which plays a vital role in the development of intelligent autonomous systems and in many application areas of cognitive systems. This chapter further classifies interactions into three types. The first is machine-machine interactions, including networking and information understanding. The second is people-machine interaction, often referred to as Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Finally, impacts of technology on person-to-person communication. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved