Human-Agent Teamwork

Teamwork concepts:

• Joint activities
  • Interpredictability
    ability, to predict what others will do (foresee if someone needs help e.g.  exit the train with a baby stroller)
  • Common ground
    team has to have mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions about others' skills or capabilities -> related to the Ontology in our project
  • Directability
    individuals can modify actions of the others, as well as conditions and priorities
    one can influence others, they react to the influence 

• shared mental model
  • Mental Model
    • = internal representation of the world, which is used to describe, explain and predict
    • related to 'theory of mind'
    • a theory of mind enables the ability to attribute mental states (beliefs, intentions, emotions, desires) that are different from one's own
      example: Richard believes that Mary intends him to persuade Albert that...
  • Shared mental Model
    
    • 'overlap' of individual mental models, knowledge representation shared by team members
      *same use as a mental model, but for team behavior (describe, explain, predict)
    • allows coordination and adaption of changes

• Team Structures
  • Teams with key members (manager)
  • Teams with subteams
  • Teams with changing team members (!avoid loss if knowledge)
    

Our Team structure:

In our group, we had a dynamic change of responsibility and workload. Normally we split the work during the week into smaller parts and shared it between all 6 group members or divided it into smaller teams. At the beginning of next week, we shared our progress within the XWiki or in a short meeting to be back on the same level. Using this team structure all of us were able to continue working on each part and we were flexible enough to take care of personal difficulties (almost everyone of us was sick during the quarter or had urgent submissions).