Communicative Agents for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning Workbench (CoASTeR-WB) Navy SBIR FY2010.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2010.1 Topic No.: N101-076 Topic Title: Communicative Agents for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning Workbench (CoASTeR-WB) Proposal No.: N101-076-0386 Firm: Knexus Research Corp. 9120 Beachway Lane Springfield, Virginia 22153 Contact: Kalyan Gupta Phone: (703) 203-3859 Web Site: www.knexusresearch.com Abstract: Currently there are no software platforms for developing and evaluating reusable, virtual, communicative spatio-temporal agents. This makes rapid development and meaningful comparative evaluation, critical requirements for military and non-military applications, infeasible. Lack of such a platform also slows down the much needed research in spatio-temporal technologies. We will architect a software workbench called CoASTeR-WB (Communicative Agent for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning) to meet these requirements. In contrast to the state-of-the-art technologies that use disparate and proprietary representation and reasoning technologies, we will investigate a unique framework for plug-and-play open-source virtual worlds and communicative technologies and reusable spatio-temporal reasoning agents. We will investigate automatic methods for achieving semantic interoperability among CoASTeR-WB components. We will investigate the use of a cognitive architecture as a robust foundation for developing spatio-temporal agents for advanced navigation and extra-navigational tasks. Finally, we will develop specifications for a built-in evaluation framework with a library of spatio-temporal reasoning tasks and annotated scenarios to enable rapid, consistent, and comparative evaluations. We will validate our approach by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype and executing an evaluation run with a library of sample spatio-temporal reasoning test-problems. Benefits: We believe that CoASTeR-WB will bring the Department of Defense (DoD) a step closer to its acquisition goals where the demand for using virtual agents in combat training for urban warfare, urban surveillance, and search and rescue is growing exponentially. CoASTeR-WB also has the potential to usher in a new era of non-military applications as wide ranging as law enforcement, accident investigation, and interior design. It shall provide developers an unprecedented ability to rapidly endow their virtual agents with human-like multi-modal communicative abilities. With the availability of a cognitive architecture as part of CoASTeR-WB, and as the foundation for developing agents, we foresee rapid scientific advancement in the currently stagnant field of spatio-temporal cognition and reasoning. Most of all, we expect CoASTeR-WB's built-in evaluation framework to standardize, greatly simplify, and speedup comparative evaluation of virtual agents. Return