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Why Planserve?. Ruth Aylett Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford. Example 1. Web-based character interfaces For example MS Agent A toolkit for creating animated characters on web pages. Toolbox of technologies Speech rec, text-to-speech Scripting language
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Why Planserve? Ruth Aylett Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford
Example 1 • Web-based character interfaces • For example MS Agent • A toolkit for creating animated characters on web pages
Toolbox of technologies Speech rec, text-to-speech Scripting language Controls animation at high-level Good but rigid: no planning Pre-designed characters Rather cutesy, but you can create your own (Only viewable with Active X) What it offers
Loading Merlin AgentControl.Characters.Load(“Merlin”,”http://agent.microssoft.com/…”) Create an object reference Merlin= AgentControl,Characters.Character(“Merlin”) Get Merlin’s animations Merlin.Get(“animation”,”greet”,”speak”,”leave”) Move Merlin on the screen Merlin.MoveTo (500,800) Have Merlin speak Merlin.Speak(“Hello, I’m Merlin”) Basic commands
The problem • Scripting is very rigid • better action-selection involves planning • But creating a planner is a major challenge • People who do this work may be graphic designers, not AI people • Interface which allows call on planning • Support for deciding which actions • Mechanisms to attach to rest of system
Example 2 • Running experiments on orbiting resources • Users are scientists • There may be lots of them • Experiments involve action-sequencing • Maybe in the future many orbital resources • What support for experiment design?
A problem-solving grid • Distributed computational resource • As in current grid projects • Reliable generation/execution in real-time • Where non-interactive planning is feasible • Design and configuration support • Access for domain experts • Problem-centred not planning-centred
Issues • Fashion • Planning is ‘old hat’- a bad word to use • Find interesting users and domains • Sell the sizzle • Exploit grid weaknesses • Still a technology looking for problems to solve • E-science needs more than computational power