Goal Reasoning: Foundations Emerging Applications , and Prospects

Goal reasoning has a bright future as a foundation for the research and development of intelligent agents. Goal reasoning is the study of agents that can deliberate on and self-select their objectives, which is a desirable capability for some applications of deliberative autonomy. This capability is of interest to several Al subcommtinities and applications. Our group has focused on how goal reasoning can assist with controlling autonomous systems. The importance of how agents reason about goals is growing and it merits increased attention, particularly from the perspective of research on AI safety. In this article, I introduce goal reasoning, briefly relate it to other Al topics, summarize some of our group's work on goal reasoning foundations and emerging applications, and describe some current and future research directions.