Plan recognition, activity recognition, and goal recognition all involve making inferences about other actors based on observations of their interactions with the environment and other agents. This synergistic area of research combines, unites, and makes use of techniques and research from a wide range of areas including user modeling, machine vision, automated planning, intelligent user interfaces, human-computer interaction, autonomous and multi-agent systems, natural language understanding, and machine learning. It plays a crucial role in a wide variety of applications including assistive technology, software assistants, computer and network security, human-robot collaboration, natural language processing, video games, and many more. This wide range of applications and disciplines has produced a wealth of ideas, models, tools, and results in the recognition literature. However, it has also contributed to fragmentation in the field, with researchers publishing relevant results in a wide spectrum of journals and conferences. This book seeks to address this fragmentation by providing a high-level introduction and historical overview of the plan and goal recognition literature. It provides a description of the core elements that comprise these recognition problems and practical advice for modeling them. In particular, we define and distinguish the different recognition tasks. We formalize the major approaches to modeling these problems using a single motivating example. Finally, we describe a number of state-of-the-art systems and their extensions, future challenges, and some potential applications.

Plan recognition, activity recognition, and intent recognition together combine and unify techniques from user modeling, machine vision, intelligent user interfaces, human/computer interaction, autonomous and multi-agent systems, natural language understanding, and machine learning. "

Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition" explains the crucial role of these techniques in a wide variety of applications including:

personal agent assistants computer and network security opponent modeling in games and simulation systems coordination in robots and software agents web e-commerce and collaborative filtering dialog modeling video surveillance smart homes In this book, follow the history of this research area and witness exciting new developments in the field made possible by improved sensors, increased computational power, and new application areas.
Combines basic theory on algorithms for plan/activity recognition along with results from recent workshops and seminarsExplains how to interpret and recognize plans and activities from sensor dataProvides valuable background knowledge and assembles key concepts into one guide for researchers or students studying these disciplines"