Strachey Lecture: Getting AI Agents to Interact and Collaborate with Us on Our Terms

As AI technologies enter our everyday lives at an ever increasing pace, there is a greater need for AI systems to work synergistically with humans. This requires AI systems to exhibit behavior that is explainable to humans. Synthesizing such behavior requires AI systems to reason not only with their own models of the task at hand, but also about the mental models of the human collaborators. At a minimum, AI agents need approximations of human’s task and goal models, as well as the human’s model of the AI agent’s task and goal models. The former will guide the agent to anticipate and manage the needs, desires and attention of the humans in the loop, and the latter allow it to act in ways that are interpretable to humans (by conforming to their mental models of it), and be ready to provide customized explanations when needed. Using several case-studies from our ongoing research, I will discuss how such multi-model reasoning forms the basis for explainable behavior in human-aware AI systems.