  Critical to successful human interaction is a capacity for empathy - the
ability to understand and share the thoughts and feelings of another. As
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly required to interact with
humans in a myriad of settings, it is important to enable AI to wield empathy
as a tool to benefit those it interacts with. In this paper, we work towards
this goal by bringing together a number of important concepts: empathy, AI
planning, and reasoning in the presence of knowledge and belief. We formalize
the notion of Empathetic Planning which is informed by the beliefs and
affective state of the empathizee. We appeal to an epistemic logic framework to
represent the beliefs of the empathizee and propose AI planning-based
computational approaches to compute empathetic solutions. We illustrate the
potential benefits of our approach by conducting a study where we evaluate
participants' perceptions of the agent's empathetic abilities and assistive
capabilities.
