Abstract
The Intelligent Assistant (IA) is an integrated system of intelligent software agents that helps the user with communication, information and time management. The IA includes specialist assistants for e-mail prioritization and telephone call filtering (communication management), Web search and Yellow Pages® lookup (information management), and calendar scheduling (time management). Each such assistant is designed to have a model of the user and a learning module for acquiring user preferences. In addition, the IA includes a toolbar providing a graphical interface to the system, a multimodal interface for accepting spoken commands and tracking the user’s activity, and a co-ordinator responsible for managing communication from the system to the user and for initiating system activities on the user’s behalf. A primary design objective of the IA is that its operation is as transparent as possible, to enable the user to control the system as far as is practicable without incurring a heavy overhead when creating and modifying the system’s behaviour. Hence each specialist assistant is designed to represent its user model in a way that is intuitively understandable to non-technical users, and is configured to adaptively modify its user model through time to accommodate the user’s changing preferences. However, in contrast to adaptive interface agents built under the behaviour-based paradigm, the assistants in the IA embrace complex AI representations and machine learning techniques to accomplish more sophisticated behaviour.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Maes, P.: Agents that Reduce Work and Information Overload. Communications of the ACM 37(7), 31–40 (1994)
Azvine, B., Wobcke, W.R.: Human-Centred Intelligent Systems and Soft Computing. BT Technology Journal 16(3), 125–133 (1998)
Bonissone, P.P.: Soft Computing: The Convergence of Emerging Reasoning Technologies. Soft Computing 1(1), 6–18 (1997)
Nauck, D., Klawonn, F., Kruse, R.: Foundations of Neuro-Fuzzy Systems. Wiley, Chichester (1997)
Russell, S.J., Norvig, P.: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Prentice- Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1995)
Nwana, H.S.: Software Agents: An Overview. The Knowledge Engineering Review 11(3), 205–244 (1996)
Maes, P.: Modeling Adaptive Autonomous Agents. Artificial Life Journal 1, 135–162 (1994)
Malone, T.W., Lai, K.-Y., Grant, K.R.: Agents for Information Sharing and Coordination: A History and Some Reflections. In: Bradshaw, J.M. (ed.) Software Agents. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (1997)
Soltysiak, S.J., Crabtree, I.B.: Automatic Learning of User Profiles-—Towards the Personalisation of Agent Services. BT Technology 16(3), 110–117 (1998)
Chin, D.N.: Intelligent Interfaces as Agents. In: Sullivan, J.W., Tyler, S.W. (eds.) Intelligent User Interfaces. ACM Press, NewYork (1991)
Dent, L., Boticario, J., McDermott, J., Mitchell, T.M., Zabowski, D.A.: A Personal Learning Apprentice. In: Proceedings of the Tenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 1992), pp. 96–103 (1992)
Kautz, H.A., Selman, B., Coen, M., Ketchpel, S.P., Ramming, C.: An Experiment in the Design of Software Agents. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 1994), pp. 438–443 (1994)
Sycara, K.P., Zeng, D.: Coordination of Multiple Intelligent Software Agents. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 5(2), 181–211 (1996)
Oates, T., Nagendra Prasad, M.V., Lesser, V.R., Decker, K.S.: A Distributed Problem Solving Approach to Cooperative Information Gathering. In: Information Gathering from Heterogeneous, Distributed Environments: Papers from the 1995 AAAI Symposium, pp. 133-137 (1995)
Decker, K.S., Lesser, V.R., Nagendra Prasad, M.V., Wagner, T.: MACRON: An Architecture for Multi-agent Cooperative Information Gathering. In: Proceedings of the CIKM 1995 Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents (1995)
Wahlster, W.: User and Discourse Models for Multimodal Communication. In: Sullivan, J.W., Tyler, S.W. (eds.) Intelligent User Interfaces. ACM Press, New York (1991)
Moran, D.B., Cheyer, A.J., Julia, L.E., Martin, D.L., Park, S.: Multimodal User Interfaces in the Open Agent Architecture. In: Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 61–68 (1997)
Georgeff, M.P., Lansky, A.L.: Reactive Reasoning and Planning. In: Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 1987), pp. 677–682 (1987)
Jennings, N.R.: Commitments and Conventions: The Foundation of Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems. The Knowledge Engineering Review 8(3), 223–250 (1993)
Scahill, F., Talintyre, J.E., Johnson, S.H., Bass, A.E., Lear, J.A., Franklin, D.J., Lee, P.R.: Speech Recognition—Making It Work for Real. BT Technology Journal 14(1), 151–164 (1996)
Tsui, K.C., Azvine, B.: Intelligent Multimodal User Interface. In: Azvine, B., Nauck, D.D., Azarmi, N. (eds.) Intelligent Systems and Soft Computing. LNCS, vol. 1804. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Wobcke, W.R.: Time Management in the Intelligent Assistant. In: Azvine, B., Nauck, D.D., Azarmi, N. (eds.) Intelligent Systems and Soft Computing. LNCS, vol. 1804. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Djian, D.P.: Communication Management: E-mail and Telephone Assistants. In: Azvine, B., Nauck, D.D., Azarmi, N. (eds.) Intelligent Systems and Soft Computing. LNCS, vol. 1804. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
De Roeck, A., Kruschwitz, U., Scott, P., Steel, S., Turner, R., Webb, N.: The YPA-—An Assistant for Classified Directory Enquiries. In: Azvine, B., Nauck, D.D., Azarmi, N. (eds.) Intelligent Systems and Soft Computing. LNCS, vol. 1804. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Dubois, D., Prade, H.M.: Processing Fuzzy Temporal Knowledge. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 19, 729–744 (1989)
Nwana, H.S., Ndumu, D.T., Lee, L.C.: ZEUS: An Advanced Tool-Kit for Engineering Distributed Multi-Agent Systems. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology, pp. 377–391 (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Azvine, B., Djian, D., Tsui, K.C., Wobcke, W. (2000). The Intelligent Assistant: An Overview. In: Azvine, B., Nauck, D.D., Azarmi, N. (eds) Intelligent Systems and Soft Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1804. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10720181_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10720181_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67837-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44917-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive