Defining Characteristics

A defining characteristic of interactive intelligent systems is that they include some form of intelligence – in the sense used in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), though in some cases the technology in question is no longer primarily or strongly associated with the AI field.

The second defining characteristic, interactivity, normally means that what the system does is perceived by – and influenced by – its users. Where no user input to a system is possible, the system can still be considered interactive if it is intended to support some sort of action on the part of the users. For example, a system that generates performances of virtual characters for the entertainment of passive viewers would not be considered interactive. But if the characters’ performances are intended to support some sort of decision-making or action by users, the system can be viewed as interactive, because it raises many of the same general issues that are raised by systems that are interactive in a narrower sense.  

Relevant Areas of Research

Research on interactive intelligent systems is conducted in (parts of) many areas of research. TiiS welcomes relevant submissions from all of these areas, and its board of Associate Editors has been selected with the goal of ensuring expert reviewing of all relevant submissions.

The following list of areas, though representative, is not exhaustive; and different terms are sometimes used to describe the areas. TiiS therefore publishes some articles on topics that do not match any of the phrases listed below.

On the other hand, in some of these areas only a fraction of the research that is conducted concerns interactive intelligent systems. Therefore, not every manuscript that falls into one of these areas is relevant to TiiS.

The list of areas is organized in terms of the levels on which a system’s intelligence can be found.

Intelligence Mainly in the User Interface

• Multimodal interaction
• Natural language processing
• Embodied conversational agents
• Computer graphics
• Accessible computing
• ...

Intelligence Mainly in the Functionality Behind the User Interface

• Crowd and machine intelligence
• Recommender systems
• Information retrieval
• Intelligent learning environments
• ...

Intelligence in the Methods Used to Develop or Test a User Interface

• Model-based design of user interfaces
• Automated usability testing
• ...

Intelligence on More Than One Level

• Information visualization and visual analytics
• Human-robot interaction
• Semantic technologies
• User modeling, adaptation, and personalization
• Ubiquitous computing
• Mobile computing
• AI and games
• Knowledge capture
• ...

Note: “Artificial intelligence”, “human-computer interaction”, and “intelligent user interfaces” are not listed as separate areas here, since each of them overlaps with many of the listed areas.