Mixing the reactive with the personal: Opportunities for end user programming in Personal information management

While human personal assistants routinely take actions on behalf of their supervisors, proactive assistance in personal information management (PIM) software today remains limited to basic reminding and e-mail filtering functions. In this chapter, we introduce a prototype information assistance engine that lets endusers delegate to it various simple, routine but contextand activityreactive tasks. To track user context and activity, our system, Atomate, treats web feeds (e.g., RSS/ATOM) from "life-tracking" web sites as sensor streams. Information from these feeds is integrated with information from other online resources such as social networking sites, online calendaring tools, and messaging services to form a simple but robust internal RDF world model. This world model facilitates integration with heterogeneous services, making possible the construction of behaviors with the ability to carry out tasks ranging from context-aware retrieval, filtering, and message routing to social coordination. To make behaviors easy and natural for end-users to specify, Atomate features a constrained natural language interface (CNLI) that guides and accelerates input using predictive auto-complete and correction.