Aptima Seeks to Facilitate Human-AI Collaboration Through Minecraft Testing Environment

Aptima, an engineering services provider based in Woburn, Massachusetts, is working on a $1M contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to explore human-bot collaboration using artificial intelligence. 

Under the terms of the contract, Aptima will work towards facilitating interaction and information sharing between AI agents and humans as part of the agency’s Adaptive Distributed Allocation of Probabilistic Tasks project. To do so, the engineering company will create a testing environment within the confines of the Minecraft video game, Breaking Defense reported.

According to Adam Fouse, Aptima’s ADAPT program manager, teams of humans will take part in the testing environment in Minecraft and will get advice from an AI model. 

The virtual environment will serve as an avenue for the AI model to observe humans as they perform tasks within the game. After gaining repeated exposure to human tasks, the AI should then be able to assign humans and custom in-game AI agents to perform the tasks for which they are best suited.

By conducting tests within the Minecraft environment, researchers will be able to record and learn from how people collaborate on tasks and then observe how they will work alongside an AI agent. 

Specifically, Fouse wants humans to be able to communicate new information to an AI agent, which it may be missing due to a lack of sensors, for example. Similarly, Fouse hopes for the AI to efficiently communicate with humans in such a way that they can easily understand the AI’s insights within a glance. 

Work on ADAPT builds on Aptima’s contract with the DARPA for the Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams project.