Haythem O. Ismail
Ismail is developing a theory of embodied cognitive agents that can discuss in natural language what they have done and are doing. Such agents are aware of their environment, and this awareness directs their actions and allows them to handle interrupts and failure. Crucial to the notion of awareness is a subjective theory of time, where a NOW pointer moves as changes are detected in the environment. Reasoning about the moving NOW raises unique and interesting problems that do not emerge within an objective theory of time. In addition, a first-person theory of situations is being developed to allow the agents to reason about events, not from static linguistic descriptions, but dynamically as they unfold in time.