Date and time: 11.30am - 12.30pm, Friday 26th Sept, 2008
Venue: 10.08.03 (Building 10, Level 8, Room 3)
Abstract:
Abstract: Today's busy knowledge worker juggles competing tasks and
responsibilities while balancing deadlines, resources, and events. How
can computers help increase productivity (and not decrease it) as the scope and
complexity of knowledge-based work grows? We describe
exploration into intelligent personal assistive agents that can aid a human in
managing and performing tasks. Part of the larger CALO project
(http://www.calosystem.org/),
a PExA agent is designed to relieve its user of routine tasks, thus allowing her
to focus on tasks that
critically require human problem-solving skills, and to appropriately support in
situations where cognitive overload leads to oversights or
mistakes by its user. Seeded with default problem-solving knowledge, PExA
learns to expand and improve its capabilities over time by
observing and interacting with its user.
About the speaker:
Neil Yorke-Smith is a Computer
Scientist at SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center. His research focuses on
technologies that assist
human decision making, with interests including planning and scheduling,
preferences, advisable agents, intelligent user interfaces, and
constraint programming, and their real-world applications. He received his
Ph.D. from Imperial College London in 2004. Publications and
further information are available at:
http://www.ai.sri.com/~nysmith