cobot's web page


Here, HFh teaches cobot how to doctor photographs.


Here's an illegible graph representation of some of the social relationships that cobot has in his head. There is also a larger graph.

What's a cobot?

Oh, cobot is a software agent who lives in LambdaMOO, an active online community frequented by several hundred users (it's a great place, and we highly recommend it). His goal in life is to interact with other members of the community and to become a real part of his social fabric. Toward this end, Cobot builds models of those around him, based on statistics of who performs what actions, and on whom they use them. For example, Cobot notices which users converse with each other most frequently. Cobot can answer queries about this information, but also uses this to try to learn socially appropriate actions. A representation of the social interactions that cobot captures and a detailed description can be found here.

The cobot dialogue system

For awhile, interested LambdaMOO users could even talk on the phone with cobot. The system was known as cobotDS, or "The Phone Thing". After completing a user trial of the system, we wrote it up. See below.

What's a LambdaMOO?

That's a long story. It needs a whole page for an explanation.

Research publications about cobot:

  • Cobot in LambdaMOO: An Adaptive Social Statistics Agent. C. Isbell, M. Kearns, S. Singh, C. Shelton, P. Stone, D. Kormann. Autonmous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 13(3), page 327-354, 2006. (one PDF version)

    This is a journal article that summarizes and extends the first two conference papers. It is probably the version to read.

  • Cobot in LambdaMOO: A Social Statistics Agent. C. Isbell, M. Kearns, D. Kormann, S. Singh, P. Stone. Appeared in AAAI 2000. (PDF)

  • A Social Reinforcement Learning Agent. C. Isbell, C. Shelton, M. Kearns, S. Singh, P. Stone. Agents 2001. Winner for best paper. (PDF)

  • CobotDS: A Spoken Dialogue System for Chat. M. Kearns, C. Isbell, S. Singh, D. Litman, J. Howe. AAAI, 2002. (PDF)

Links to media articles about cobot: