Introduction

What is intelligence? One of many possible definitions can be ‘goal-directed adaptive behaviour’. While the 2024 Nobel Prizes recognized the work in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the term itself is relatively new, first appearing during the Dartmouth Workshop in 1956. However, one of the primary aims of AI was and still is to make human-like machines or perhaps a virtual human, thanks to Hollywood movies, maybe a look-alike of the best actor of the day. This concept of a virtual human took root in the pursuit of developing automated machines in the historic era. While Chapter 3 will look back at the history of automation, this pursuit of a virtual human or human-like system brings AI closer to human–machine interaction. In the mid-1980s, when computers were gradually becoming a household commodity from a lab sophistication, the book T he Psychology of Human Computer Interaction initiated a new discipline in human–computer interaction ( Card et al. 1983 ). One of the earliest cognitive models, called the Model Human Processor ( Card et al. 1983 ), and its more ambitious cousin, the SOAR cognitive architecture ( Newell 1990 ), borrow their propositional logic-based knowledge representation from the General Problem Solver, sort of a holy grail of symbolic AI. Taking one step back, it was during the Second World War when theoretical analysis of man–machine interaction became important for the rapidly evolving military hardware, and soon a need was felt for a ‘user model’ or ‘virtual human’ to automatically test hardware against a range of human abilities. With the advancement of AI and computing hardware, intelligent user interfaces (IUIs) gradually became commonplace through new applications, interaction techniques, data interpretation and so on.