FRIEND: A human-aware BDI agent architecture

Effective relationships between people and technology are essential for organizational response (agility, adaptation, and innovation). Advances in computing power, and the rise of complex ubiquitous systems, raise a challenge for managing this relationship given limits of human physical and cognitive capacities. To re-align people with computing technology involves either improved human training, or streamlining technologies to fit human needs, abilities, and perceptions. This paper looks at this socio-technical gap and makes a case for intelligent agent mediation through passive human-input monitoring (human-context awareness) and basic models of human behavior. The target audience is interdisciplinary, involving the cognitive informatics, agent systems, bodynet, socio-technical systems, and human-computer-interface communities. The overall contribution is in the combination of socio-technical systems engineering and human factors concepts with the agent-based paradigm and cognitive sensing technologies towards new, “Human-tech” friendly agent applications for everyday socio-technical systems. As such an early architectural design for such agents is presented, as well as future research directions toward its development.