The increasing complexity of our world demands new perspectives on the role of technology in human decision making. We need new technology to cope with the increasingly complex and information-rich nature of our modern society. This is particularly true for critical environments such as crisis management and traffic management, where humans need to engage in close collaborations with artificial systems to observe and understand the situation and respond in a sensible way. The book Interactive Collaborative Information Systems addresses techniques that support humans in situations in which complex information handling is required and that facilitate distributed decision-making. The theme integrates research from information technology, artificial intelligence and human sciences to obtain a multidisciplinary foundation from which innovative actor-agent systems for critical environments can emerge. It emphasizes the importance of building actor-agent communities: close collaborations between human and artificial actors that highlight their complementary capabilities in situations where task distribution is flexible and adaptive. This book focuses on the employment of innovative agent technology, advanced machine learning techniques, and cognition-based interface technology for the use in collaborative decision support systems. Front Matter....Pages - Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Approximate Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning....Pages 3-44 Learning with Whom to Communicate Using Relational Reinforcement Learning....Pages 45-63 Switching between Representations in Reinforcement Learning....Pages 65-84 Front Matter....Pages 85-85 A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Collaboration: Principal Description Methods and Efficient Heuristic Approximations....Pages 87-124 Efficient Methods for Near-Optimal Sequential Decision Making under Uncertainty....Pages 125-153 Ant Colony Learning Algorithm for Optimal Control....Pages 155-182 Map-Based Support for Effective Collaboration in Micro-mobile Virtual Teams....Pages 183-203 Front Matter....Pages 205-205 Affective Dialogue Management Using Factored POMDPs....Pages 207-236 Context-Aware Multimodal Human–Computer Interaction....Pages 237-272 Design Issues for Pen-Centric Interactive Maps....Pages 273-297 Interacting with Adaptive Systems....Pages 299-325 Example-Based Human Pose Recovery under Predicted Partial Occlusions....Pages 327-354 Front Matter....Pages 355-355 Agility and Adaptive Autonomy in Networked Organizations....Pages 357-373 Adaptive Hierarchical Multi-agent Organizations....Pages 375-400 Method for Designing Networking Adaptive Interactive Hybrid Systems....Pages 401-421 Front Matter....Pages 423-423 A Call for Sensemaking Support Systems in Crisis Management....Pages 425-452 A Distributed Approach to Gas Detection and Source Localization Using Heterogeneous Information....Pages 453-474 Traffic Light Control by Multiagent Reinforcement Learning Systems....Pages 475-510 Fusing Heterogeneous and Unreliable Data from Traffic Sensors....Pages 511-545 Bayesian Networks for Expert Systems: Theory and Practical Applications....Pages 547-578 Back Matter....Pages - The increasing complexity of our world demands new perspectives on the role of technology in decision making. Human decision making has its li- tations in terms of information-processing capacity. We need new technology to cope with the increasingly complex and information-rich nature of our modern society. This is particularly true for critical environments such as crisis management and tra?c management, where humans need to engage in close collaborations with arti?cial systems to observe and understand the situation and respond in a sensible way. We believe that close collaborations between humans and arti?cial systems will become essential and that the importance of research into Interactive Collaborative Information Systems (ICIS) is self-evident. Developments in information and communication technology have ra- cally changed our working environments. The vast amount of information available nowadays and the wirelessly networked nature of our modern so- ety open up new opportunities to handle di?cult decision-making situations such as computer-supported situation assessment and distributed decision making. To make good use of these new possibilities, we need to update our traditional views on the role and capabilities of information systems. The aim of the Interactive Collaborative Information Systems project is to develop techniques that support humans in complex information en- ronments and that facilitate distributed decision-making capabilities. ICIS emphasizes the importance of building actor-agent communities: close c- laborations between human and arti?cial actors that highlight their comp- mentary capabilities, and in which task distribution is ?exible and adaptive.
