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Like an intuitive and courteous butler: a proactive personal agent for task management

Published: 10 May 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The ability to proactively offer assistance promises to make personal agents more helpful to their users. We characterize the properties desired of proactive behaviour by a personal assistant agent in the realm of task management, and present an extended agent cognition model that features a meta-level layer charged with identifying potentially helpful actions and determining when it is appropriate to perform them. The reasoning that answers these questions draws on a theory of proactivity that describes user desires and a model of helpfulness. Operationally, assistance patterns represent a compiled form of this knowledge, instantiating meta-cognition over the agent's beliefs about its user's activities as well as over world state. We have implemented the resulting generic framework for proactive goal generation and deliberation as part of a personal assistant agent in the desktop domain.

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  • (2016)What Can You Do?Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems10.1145/2901790.2901842(264-275)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2016
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  1. Like an intuitive and courteous butler: a proactive personal agent for task management

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    Published In

    cover image Guide Proceedings
    AAMAS '09: Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1
    May 2009
    701 pages
    ISBN:9780981738161

    Sponsors

    • Drexel University
    • Wiley-Blackwell
    • Microsoft Research: Microsoft Research
    • Whitestein Technologies
    • European Office of Aerospace Research and Development, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, United States Air Force Research Laboratory
    • The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents

    Publisher

    International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

    Richland, SC

    Publication History

    Published: 10 May 2009

    Author Tags

    1. CALO
    2. assistive agents
    3. proactivity
    4. task management

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    • Research-article

    Acceptance Rates

    AAMAS '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 132 of 651 submissions, 20%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

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    • (2023)Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions: Effect of Context Switching On Prospective MemoryProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580778(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2017)How to Remember What to RememberProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/31309031:3(1-20)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2017
    • (2016)What Can You Do?Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems10.1145/2901790.2901842(264-275)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2016
    • (2012)On sociocultural aspects of user elicitationProceedings of the 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium10.1145/2362724.2362736(45-51)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2012
    • (2012)Talking to machinesCommunications of the ACM10.1145/2133806.213381255:4(14-16)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2012
    • (2012)Human-agent teamwork in dynamic environmentsComputers in Human Behavior10.1016/j.chb.2011.08.00628:1(23-33)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2012
    • (2012)Realizing networks of proactive smart productsProceedings of the 18th international conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management10.1007/978-3-642-33876-2_30(337-352)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2012

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