Person:

Law, Edith

This paper envisions a multi-agent system that assists patients and their health care providers. This system would support a diverse, evolving team in formulating, monitoring and revising a shared "care plan" that operates on multiple time scales in uncertain environments. It would also enhance communication of health information within this planning framework. The coordination of care for children with complex conditions (CCC), which is a compelling societal need, is presented as a model environment in which to develop and assess such systems. The design of algorithms and techniques needed to realize this vision would yield agents capable of being collaborative partners in health care delivery broadly as well as in other environments with similar properties such as rescue and rebuilding after natural disasters. This paper describes the key characteristics of collaborative health care plan support, defines a set of essential capabilities for autonomous "care-augmenting software agents", and discusses three major multi-agents systems research challenges that building such agents raises: evolving long-term plan management, enhancing team interactions, and leveraging human computation for care plan customization.

An important class of tasks that are underexplored in current human computation systems are complex tasks with global constraints. One example of such a task is itinerary planning, where solutions consist of a sequence of activities that meet requirements specified by the requester. In this paper, we focus on the crowdsourcing of such plans as a case study of constraint-based human computation tasks and introduce a collaborative planning system called Mobi that illustrates a novel crowdware paradigm. Mobi presents a single interface that enables crowd participants to view the current solution context and make appropriate contributions based on current needs. We conduct experiments that explain how Mobi enables a crowd to effectively and collaboratively resolve global constraints, and discuss how the design principles behind Mobi can more generally facilitate a crowd to tackle problems involving global constraints.