Towards cognitive systems for assisted cooperative processes of goal finding and strategy change

In the future, people and intelligent technical systems will cooperate in situations in which the goals, means, or actions are not completely prespecified, but develop in the course of a process that entails also the finding of new goals and strategies. This position paper presents an account of how these processes can be described such that they enable support of human decision-making and action coordination in such open, under-specified scenarios. We discuss how technical cognitive systems can assist these processes by bringing together techniques for multi-modal processing, information retrieval, situated action planning and autonomous action generation, with novel capabilities of recognizing and anticipating task-related (cognitive-intentional, procedural, affective) states of the actors, and for cooperative goal refinement and action coordination among the actors. A foremost requirement is to automatically provide markers for the indication of necessary strategy changes that reconFigure the space of actions, where it is to be expected that such strategy changes may require explanation and mediation. To that end, cognitive systems and robots must be endowed with new kinds of models of (explicit or implicit) cooperative processes.