Constructionist Design Methodology for Interactive Intelligences

We present a methodology for designing and implementing interactive intelligences. The Constructionist Methodology – so called because it advocates modular building blocks and incorporation of prior work – addresses factors that we see as key to future advances in A.I., including interdisciplinary collaboration support, coordination of teams and large-scale systems integration. We test the methodology by creating an interactive multi-functional system with a real-time perception-action loop. An embodied virtual agent, situated in an augmented-reality system, can perceive both real and virtual objects in a room and interact with a user through coordinated gestures and speech. Wireless tracking technologies give the agent awareness of the environment and the user’s speech and communicative acts. User and agent can communicate about things in the environment, their placement and function, as well as more abstract topics such as current news, through situated multimodal dialog. The results demonstrate the Constructionist Methodology’s strengths for simplifying the modeling of complex, multi-functional systems with unexplored architectures, unclear sub-system boundaries, undefined variables, and tangled data flow and control hierarchies.