Adaptive Knowledge Assistants

Intelligent user interfaces (IUI) represent a promising approach to improving user productivity and experience in software systems. One class of users that could benefit from such interfaces is knowledge workers, who routinely process large quantities of information from various sources to form new domain-specific knowledge. However, several challenges exist in properly supporting such users, including difficulties in automatically discovering knowledge for users, insufficient resources (e.g., time, skills, user patience) to complete all assigned tasks, varying levels of domain expertise, managing complex tasks, coordinating user collaboration, and unobtrusively assisting users without increasing user frustration and decreasing productivity. To handle these challenges, we present a framework called Adaptive Knowledge Assistants that draws on multiple IUI technologies to provide customized, intelligent support to knowledge workers. We also describe the current instantiation of this framework in the Biofinity Intelligent Wiki.