An intelligent user interface (Intelligent UI, IUI, or sometimes Interface Agent) is a

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

(UI) that involves some aspect of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

(AI or computational intelligence). There are many modern examples of IUIs, the most famous (or infamous) being the Microsoft

Office Assistant The Office Assistant is a discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which user interface, interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Off ...

, whose most recognizable agentive representation was called " Clippy". Generally, an IUI involves the computer-side having sophisticated knowledge of the domain and/or a model of the user. These allow the interface to better understand the user's needs and personalize or guide the interaction.

History

Probably the earliest examples of what could be considered true IUIs appeared in the Intelligent Computer Assisted Instruction (ICAI, aka.

intelligent tutoring system An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a computer system that imitates human tutors and aims to provide immediate and customized instruction or feedback to learners, usually without requiring intervention from a human teacher. ITSs have the comm ...

s) community, which arose in the 1960s and 1970s and become popular (among academics) in the 1980s. Also, in the early 1980s, as

expert system In artificial intelligence (AI), an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as ...

s took hold in the AI community, expert systems were applied to UIs (e.g., the aptly-named "WIZARD" system). In the 1990s the application of plan inference to interaction formed the basis for research in what then was named natural interfaces (the term has later come to evolve to mean full-body interaction). Later IUIs, such as Clippy, are more statistically-based, using

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

methods to decide how to tune the interactive experience to the individual user. In the 2000s this strand of research often is labeled

personalization Personalization (broadly known as customization) consists of tailoring a service or product to accommodate specific individuals. It is sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. Personalization involves collecting data on individuals, ...

, most often employing various

recommender system A recommender system (RecSys), or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing ''system'' with terms such as ''platform'', ''engine'', or ''algorithm'') and sometimes only called "the algorithm" or "algorithm", is a subclass of information fi ...

techniques to adapt the behavior of an interface or an entire interactive system to individual user preferences.

Definitional difficulty

What constitutes "intelligent" is potentially disputable, as is what counts as an "interface". The field is in practice defined by the community of researchers and the channels they publish in.

Research

Research in intelligent user interfaces is published in general Human-Computer Interaction conferences and journals such as CHI or UIST as well as in some artificial intelligence research channels such as those hosted by the AAAI, but most importantly there are the dedicated conference series o
Intelligent User Interfaces
(since 1988) an
Recommender Systems
(since 2007), as well as the journa
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
(since 1990).

Humanizing cues

As practical concept of social interface design, social interface is seen in the studies of human-computer interaction (in particular, its computer interface aspect). The basic thesis is that where a computer interface is more akin to another human, it can facilitate correct responses from users during human-to-computer interaction. Software that can provide such humanizing cues often does it by creating interface with human-like quality (such as giving recognizable

gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...

to a

software agent In computer science, a software agent is a computer program that acts for a user or another program in a relationship of agency. The term ''agent'' is derived from the Latin ''agere'' (to do): an agreement to act on one's behalf. Such "action on ...

). Studies are often concerned with how should such agents (like the Microsoft Agent) be designed to make them more appealing (is having

facial expression Facial expression is the motion and positioning of the muscles beneath the skin of the face. These movements convey the emotional state of an individual to observers and are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying ...

s efficient, should the agent be anthropomorphic, and so on).Michael A. Cusumano, Richard W. Selby, ''Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shakes Markets and Manages People''. Simon and Schuster, 1998,
Google Print, p.178
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References

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