Shiwali Mohan

I am an AI systems scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. I study human-aware AI - how to design intelligent interactive systems that model, learn, and reason about their human collaborators. I am especially interested in methods for effective and robust human-agent collaborative behavior in real-world settings. My research spans artificial intelligence & machine learning and leverages insights about human behavior from cognitive science, linguistics, and economics.

I have designed intelligent collaborative agents for a variety of application domains general purpose robots, preventive healthcare, sustainable transportation, and augmented reality learning. I am particularly motivated to build intelligent collaborative technology social good and public welfare. My work is interdisciplinary and has been published at venues for research on artificial intelligence, human cognition, human-computer interaction, medical informatics & engineering, and AI & society.

Humans of AI summarizes my ongoing research and outlines my research agenda on incorporating explicit models of humans in design of collaborative AI systems. My research statement explains it in more detail

I am a graduate of the Soar lab led by John E. Laird that traces its legacy to foundational research on human cognition by Allen Newell and human decision making by Herbert Simon. My graduate experience set me on this wonderful journey in studying the computational underpinnings of human intelligence and building intelligent systems that support them. PARC’s legacy in leveraging cognitive psychology to design more effective technology has only made this journey more adventurous.

news

May 14, 2021	Giving a talk on cognitive science and robotics at Talking Robotics.
May 6, 2021	Looking forward to talking to graduate students at UM ECSEL+.
May 1, 2021	Will be leading DARPA SAIL-ON research on desiging intelligent agents that are robust to novelties.
Apr 6, 2021	My interview with IEEE Spectrum on digital humans is published.
Mar 8, 2021	I am speaking at The Women’s Alliance about my experiences as an early-career scientist on this international women’s day.

selected publications

ACM TiiS

Exploring the Role of Common Model of Cognition in Designing Adaptive Coaching Interactions for Health Behavior Change

Mohan, Shiwali

ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (preprint) 2021

Abs arXiv

Our research aims to develop intelligent collaborative agents that are human-aware - they can model, learn, and reason about their human partner’s physiological, cognitive, and affective states. In this paper, we study how adaptive coaching interactions can be designed to help people develop sustainable healthy behaviors. We leverage the common model of cognition - CMC [26] - as a framework for unifying several behavior change theories that are known to be useful in human-human coaching. We motivate a set of interactive system desiderata based on the CMC-based view of behavior change. Then, we propose PARCoach - an interactive system that addresses the desiderata. PARCoach helps a trainee pick a relevant health goal, set an implementation intention, and track their behavior. During this process, the trainee identifies a specific goal-directed behavior as well as the situational context in which they will perform it. PARCcoach uses this information to send notifications to the trainee, reminding them of their chosen behavior and the context. We report the results from a 4-week deployment with 60 participants. Our results support the CMC-based view of behavior change and demonstrate that the desiderata for proposed interactive system design is useful in producing behavior change.
ACM TiiS

Designing an AI Health Coach and Studying its Utility in Promoting Regular Aerobic Exercise

Mohan, Shiwali, Venkatakrishnan, Anusha, and Hartzler, Andrea

ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) 2020

Abs arXiv HTML

Our research aims to develop interactive, social agents that can coach people to learn new tasks, skills, and habits. In this paper, we focus on coaching sedentary, overweight individuals (i.e., trainees) to exercise regularly. We employ adaptive goal setting in which the intelligent health coach generates, tracks, and revises personalized exercise goals for a trainee. The goals become incrementally more difficult as the trainee progresses through the training program. Our approach is model-based - the coach maintains a parameterized model of the trainee’s aerobic capability that drives its expectation of the trainee’s performance. The model is continually revised based on trainee-coach interactions. The coach is embodied in a smartphone application, NutriWalking, which serves as a medium for coach-trainee interaction. We adopt a task-centric evaluation approach for studying the utility of the proposed algorithm in promoting regular aerobic exercise. We show that our approach can adapt the trainee program not only to several trainees with different capabilities, but also to how a trainee’s capability improves as they begin to exercise more. Experts rate the goals selected by the coach better than other plausible goals, demonstrating that our approach is consistent with clinical recommendations. Further, in a 6-week observational study with sedentary participants, we show that the proposed approach helps increase exercise volume performed each week.
JAIR

Acceptable planning: Influencing Individual Behavior to Reduce Transportation Energy Expenditure of a City

Mohan, Shiwali, Rakha, Hesham, and Klenk, Matt

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 2019

Abs HTML

Our research aims at developing intelligent systems to reduce the transportation-related energy expenditure of a large city by influencing individual behavior. We introduce Copter - an intelligent travel assistant that evaluates multi-modal travel alternatives to find a plan that is acceptable to a person given their context and preferences. We propose a formulation for acceptable planning that brings together ideas from AI, machine learning, and economics. This formulation has been incorporated in Copter that produces acceptable plans in real-time. We adopt a novel empirical evaluation framework that combines human decision data with a high fidelity multi-modal transportation simulation to demonstrate a 4% energy reduction and 20% delay reduction in a realistic deployment scenario in Los Angeles, California, USA.
ACS

Characterizing an Analogical Concept Memory for Architectures Implementing the Common Model of Cognition

Mohan, Shiwali, Klenk, Matt, Shreve, Matthew, Evans, Kent, and Maxwell, John

In Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems 2020

arXiv
AAAI

Learning Fast and Slow: Levels of Learning in General Autonomous Intelligent Agents.

Laird, John, and Mohan, Shiwali

In Proeedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2018