The Assistants' Opportunity

Personal Assistants

assistant—they can make the arrangements. " Our business cards used to list only our phone numbers. When fax machines became popular, we added our fax numbers. Now, our business cards also carry our e-mail addresses and our home page URLs. What's next? It could be the network addresses of our personal assistants. These assistants will take care of our schedule and may even represent us in many ...

The Future of Intelligent Assistants

Today, we can talk to objects in our homes that recognize our voices, understand our questions, model our behaviors, and even predict our needs while communicating across vast networks of machines, computers, and distant humans. This is made possible by global supply chains optimized to produce the supercomputers in our pockets, and by the most valuable companies on the planet advancing softwar...

Physician assistants in the Netherlands.

Medical assistants: the future nurses?

Brownies as Assistants

This contribution discusses the use of assisting agents in interactive configuration systems. With so-called brownies a new metaphor for assisting agents is explored which guides the functional design but avoids the presentation problem. The metaphor can be stretched to include socially interacting agents which can support large-scale configurations. Interactive configuration Configuration prob...