ISI TEMPLE Active Templates project

From the program approval document: The Active Templates program (AcT) will produce a robust, lightweight software technology for aiding in the automation of detailed planning and execution for military operations and other highly-coordinated activities using a plan spreadsheet metaphor. Active Templates are distributed data structures whose variables will be linked to live data feeds or problem-solving methods. Active Templates will assist with automated planning and execution by capturing, improving and updating critical information such as current state, goals, constraints, alternative actions, standard defaults, problem-solving context over time, decisions, and rationale. Active Templates will be designed to be user-tailorable, networked, noise-tolerant, user-supported, scalable and widely adopted.

Within AcT, the TEMPLE project is developing software tools to aid a user in adding new constraints to active templates. This work makes use of prior work on problem-solving methods and script-based acquisition for plan evaluation performed under HPKB and ARPI.

Here is a document describing our language for sharing constraints between Active Templates tools (pdf format).

Here are some papers about our work in TEMPLE

• Visual exploration and incremental utility estimation , Blythe, AAAI 02

• Integrating expectations to support end users to acquire procedural knowledge Blythe, IJCAI 01

• An integrated environment for knowledge acquisition, Blythe et al., Best Paper, Intelligent User Interfaces 2001.

  (slides from the presentation)

Here are some presentations about TEMPLE from AcT PI meetings.

• June 2002 PI meeting (powerpoint)

• October 2001 PI meeting (powerpoint)

• October 2000 PI meeting (powerpoint).

• Overview presented at a meeting at ISI on July 18 (powerpoint).

• An overview of work on providing tools to help users edit context-free grammars used to enter planning objectives in an editing tool like MasterMind, also presented at the meeting of July 18 (powerpoint slides)

• 100 day plan (pdf file) and a related presentation from the kick-off meeting (powerpoint slides).

Expect project home page.

Our software is available to members of the Active Templates program from the program web page. If you are interested in a copy and do not have access to this web site, please contact us at the address below.