This workshop just ended, but information about it can be found at http://intentions.xyz/

Like many areas of AI, intention recognition has no established benchmarks for measuring progress. I presented a paper proposing eight design objectives that cognitive models of intention perception should try to fulfill, although these are meant to stimulate discussion toward some kind of benchmark rather than claiming to be complete solution.

An alternate approach would be to select a set of training and test data, following the example of some NLP conferences. But the amount of annotation effort needed alone, not to mention coming to agreement on it and documenting it, would be tremendous.

Whichever path toward quantifying progress we might take, I also proposed that we take-on the problem of helping to care for the huge number of elderly people in their homes, nursing facilities, and hospitals. There just aren’t enough human care-givers to deal with this imminent worldwide issue. It could be a great fit for the social robotics research community, and could bring funding and more researchers into the field while having one of the most socially-relevant impacts of any AI project.