The TRIPS (short for The Rochester Interactive Planning System) project started in the late ‘90s at the University of Rochester’s Department of Computer Science, as a successor to TRAINS. Initially it was a prototype of a collaborative planning system. The goal of the project was to build an intelligent mixed-initiative planning assistant that interacts with its human manager using a combination of natural language and graphical displays (maps, charts, windows, and the like). The system understands the interaction as a dialoguebetween it and the human. The dialogue provides the context for interpreting human utterances and actions, and provides the structure for deciding what to do in response. With the human in the loop, they and the system together can solve harder problems faster than either could solve alone.

In time, further work at University of Rochester and at IHMC led to the development of TRIPS as a platform for deep natural language understanding.

Various capabilities of TRIPS are highlighted in our demonstration videos.

References

1. Ferguson, G., and Allen, J. (1998). TRIPS: An Intelligent Integrated Problem-Solving Assistant. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98), 567–573. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. [pdf]