New software package

[Robert St. Amant]

Hi, ACT-R folks,

My group has been working for a couple of years on a project in the
area of intelligent user interfaces.  We've built what we call
interface softbots, or ibots, which are designed to use MS Windows
applications by going through their user interfaces, rather than
through an API.  Our interest was initially in giving software agents
access to additional functionality, by providing them with sensors
(i.e., image/screen processing routines) and effectors (i.e., keyboard
and mouse handling routines) appropriate for interacting with a
graphical user interface.  Recently, with the encouragement of Frank
Ritter, Richard Young, and others, we've become very interested in
cognitively plausible agents, the kind we might get if we worked ACT-R
or ACT-R/PM into this framework.

We're releasing the code for the benefit of anyone who thinks it might
be useful.  It runs on Microsoft Windows in Allegro Common Lisp, with
a Visual C++ back-end for low-level processing.  You can find all the
code at our ftp site (ftp:simon.csc.ncsu.edu).  Look in the Public
directory, in the folder vismap-00-06-14.  There's a README file there
that explains everything in a bit more detail.  There are also a fair
number of papers about the system, linked to my home page.

I've been testing the code more extensively in the past couple of
weeks, and I've discovered a few bugs in its screen processing :-[,
but it works reasonably well, if you adhere to the somewhat
idiosyncratic constraints of the development and runtime environment.
I'll be trying to iron out the remaining difficulties over the course
of the summer.  If you have any difficulty running the demos (one of
which is a very loose coupling between an old example of ACT-R/PM and
the rest of the system), please let me know.  The project does not
currently have funding, but as far as my time allows I'll try to make
the system useful to the ACT-R community.

Best regards,
Rob St. Amant
-- 
Robert St. Amant
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
North Carolina State University
http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/stamant/