A Personalized Calendar Assistant

Many calendar tools have become available to organize, display, and track a user’s commitments. However, most people still spend a considerable amount of time personally organizing meetings and managing the constant changes and adjustments that must be made to their schedules. Our goal is to provide the technology necessary to manage an individual’s calendar. The resulting agent will let the user retain control of decisions when necessary and relinquish control to the assistant at other times. Meanwhile, the agent will be sensitive to the user’s wishes and preferences. The key elements in our approach are the creation of a process framework that captures possible interactions with users and other agents, learning technology to capture the user’s preferences, and advisability to enable direct instruction by the user at various levels of abstraction. As the system improves its model of the user over time, reliance on user interaction will decrease.