Proposal to Research, Implement and Test a User Interface for Probabilistic Planning
Evan Hecht - BS Student, Computer Science
Dr. Alex Dekhtyar - Associate Professor of Computer Science

Problem
The concepts of multi-step planning with probabilistic outcomes at each stage are fairly well known and researched (at least among academics and statisticians). The planning process and computations have been implemented on computers in a many ways, with reasonable success.

However, the presentation of plans, procedures, recommended actions and likely outcomes in an intuitive manner to less-knowledgeable users has undergone little research, with even less success. For this project, we intend to create an interface for planning software such that students and workers can use it to make and understand reasonable, beneficial decision guidelines.

Background
This project will be done as a continuation of, and in collaboration with, the research and programming efforts of students and professors at the University of Kentucky. They have created PlanIt, a software suite that obtains preferences and goals from the user, then suggests courses of action in likely and unlikely scenarios (resulting from previous actions) that will lead to the previously obtained goals. When the program was tested by students at the University of Kentucky who were unfamiliar with the project, the interface was determined to be insufficiently usable or intuitive.

Method
This project has four main stages. The first stage consists of analyzing the existing interface, and determining usable and unusable components as well as making a list of suggested changes. The next stage will be a re-design of the interface, using suggestions from the previous stage as well as (hopefully) a cognitive model of how humans view and interact with stochastic planning. Implementing the re-designed interface comprises the third stage, and the final stage will be an experiment to test our interface versus the original interface.

Plan
The plan will follow the four stages outlined above. For the first stage, the project team, consisting of Brian Oppenheim, Kyle Cushing, and myself, advised and led by Professor Dekhtyar, will evaluate the current interface. This should be completed by the 5th week of the quarter, and a written evaluation of the software will be the deliverable for this stage. The next two stages, consisting of the design and implementation of a better interface, will have the redesigned software as their deliverable. Finally, after the experimental stage, the research, results, and project details will be combined into a paper covering the entire project, as a final deliverable.

My Role
My role in this project will be the same as the other members of the team. For research, design, and testing we will all work collaboratively, while during implementation we will work on separate parts of approximately equal difficulty and importance, which will then be combined.