Learning Users’ Habits to Automate Repetitive Tasks

Adaptive Programming Environment (APE), a software assistant embedded into the VisualWorks Smalltalk interactive programming environment, watches what the user is doing, draws on machine learning to learn the user’s habits, and afterward offers to complete repetitive tasks on his or her behalf. The goal of the APE project was threefold: (1) to design an assistant able to automate repetitive tasks with a minimal amount of user’s intervention, (2) to design an assistant able, as in programming-by-example (also called programming-by-demonstration) systems, to replay and automate complex repetitive tasks, and (3) to design an assistant that disrupts the user’s work as little as possible—that is, that makes the right suggestion at the right moment. As a consequence, APE employs a machine-learning algorithm we have specifically designed to learn efficiently and rapidly not only what to suggest to the user but also when to make a suggestion.