I-TEARoom - A Virtual Room to Support Collaboration involving Tasks, Events and Activity Support
Co-Habitat - Proposal for potential DARPA project in Habitats (later NICCI) program

Proposal from Austin Tate, 13-Aug-2002

• I-TEARoom - A Virtual Room to Support Collaboration involving Tasks, Events and Activity Support.
• Co-Habitat
• I-CCI (I-C2I - pronounced "eye see two eye") I-X Process Panels for Command, Control and Intelligence

I-X Process Panels (I-P2), when fully developed, will provide tools and user interfaces to aid collaboration between a wide variety and large number of individuals, group participants and organizational entities in a way that allows them to cooperate, in a task-driven way, via the sharing and exchange of issues, activities, processes, constraints, reports and messages. They utilise a shared model of these entities which is intelligible to all participants. The context for any panel (it's "I-Space") can be dynamically configured to reflect the changing status of agents, inter-agent authorities and policies. I-X Process Panels can function even when given limited knowledge. They can act anywhere in a continuum from tracking fully manually driven activity to initiating fully autonomous activity where permitted. They can allow for seamless integration of intelligent planning and dynamically responsive workflow determination and execution technologies to assist in the process of responding flexibly to emerging tasks and a changing environment as available capabilities and resources alter.

The technical infrastructure for I-X Process Panels allows for the use of any suitable inter-agent communications strategy including highly distributed fault tolerant and secure peer-to-peer methods where required.

Work on Habitats/NICCI will:

1. Refine the current simple I-X Process Panels work in the direction of developing the I-Space agent relationship model and external capability description facilities and tools to support this.
2. The panel description specification will be further developed to link with emerging work on Habitat Specifications (HSPEC and DAML-S).
3. The I-Space links to remote agent presence or status, resource availability and other context features will be developed from their current simple notions.
4. The outline ideas for the I-Space authority model will be created to allow effective mixed initiative operations to be supported by process panels.
5. Links to the domain and policy management work being undertaken by UWF/IHMC will be studied.
6. Consolidation of the I-X communications strategy which provides the inter-agent connectivity and messaging layer will be undertaken to ensure emerging secure, fault tolerant, domain-aware methods can be effectively used.

References