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Coaches are vital for effective collaboration, but cost and resource constraints often limit their availability during real-world tasks. This limitation poses serious challenges in life-critical domains that rely on effective teamwork, such as healthcare and disaster response. To address this gap, we propose and realize an innovative application of AI: task-time team coaching. Specifically, we introduce Socratic, a novel AI system that complements human coaches by providing real-time guidance during task execution. Socratic monitors team behavior, detects misalignments in team members' shared understanding, and delivers automated interventions to improve team performance. We validated Socratic through two human subject experiments involving dyadic collaboration. The results demonstrate that the system significantly enhances team performance with minimal interventions. Participants also perceived Socratic as helpful and trustworthy, supporting its potential for adoption. Our findings also suggest promising directions both for AI research and its practical applications to enhance human teamwork.
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AI-Assisted Human Teamwork
Effective teamwork translates to fewer preventable errors and higher task performance in collaborative tasks. However, in time-critical tasks, successful teamwork becomes highly challenging to attain. In such settings, often, team members have partial observability of their surroundings, incur high cost of communication, and have trouble estimating the state and intent of their teammates. To assist a team in improving teamwork at task time, my doctoral research proposes an automated task-time team intervention system. Grounded in the notion of shared mental models, the system first detects whether the team is on the same page or not. It then generates effective interventions to improve teamwork. Additionally, by leveraging past demonstrations to learn a model of team behavior, this system minimizes the need for domain experts to specify teamwork models and rules.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2205454
- PAR ID:
- 10517532
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 23415 to 23416
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Human-AI Collaboration Computer-Aided Human Decision-Making Imitation Learning Teamwork Multi-agent Systems
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i21.30408
