Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We conceptualize human-machine (computer, robot) teams as concurrent processes. Such a conceptualizationmeans: (1) the human and machine agents have a common goal or mission; (2) each agent may have different subtasks withinthe goal space; (3) they do not have a shared memory, but (4) they do have a means of communicating with each other. Processalgebras, such as communicating sequential processes (Hoare, 1977), are formal languages for describing the ways in whichtwo concurrent processes interact through message passing across information channels. In this research, we enumerate theways in which human-machine interactions can be structured, such as strictly serial, parallel, and cascade-like architectures.We use process algebras to characterize the interactions in candidate architectures. We discuss design implications for activeand interactive machine learning systems.