Calendar Scheduling with Action Items

In this note, we summarize our research interests in the general area of integrating planning capabilities into scheduling technologies. Our recent work has focused on the development of an agent-based calendar scheduling system, where intelligent agents schedule meetings on behalf of busy users. In accomplishing this task, the principal objective to date has been to schedule meetings in a way that best satisfies user preferences. However, recently we have been considering the broader idea of integrating time management into the calendar scheduling context. This does not change the overall objective of satisfying user preferences. But it does introduce the complementary need for goal-directed reasoning, to determine which additional meetings should be placed on the user’s calendar to accomplish outstanding action items. In the sections below, we first summarize the prior context of our work in calendar scheduling and then sketch the idea of layering in time management capabilities.