Publication Details

Deploying a Personalized Time Management Agent

by Berry, P. and Conley, K. and Gervasio, M. and Peintner, B. and Uribe, T. and Yorke-Smith, N.

in Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS’06) Industrial Track pp. 1564-1571,

Address: Hakodate, Japan
May 2006.

We report on our ongoing practical experience in designing, implementing, and deploying PTIME, a personalized agent for time management and meeting scheduling in an open, multi-agent environment. In developing PTIME as part of a larger assistive agent called CALO, we have faced numerous challenges, including usability, multi-agent coordination, scalable constraint reasoning, robust execution, and unobtrusive learning. Our research advances basic solutions to the fundamental problems; however, integrating PTIME into a deployed system has raised other important issues for the successful adoption of new technology. As a personal assistant, PTIME must integrate easily into a user’s real environment, support her normal workflow, respect her authority and privacy, provide natural user interfaces, and handle the issues that arise with deploying such a system in an open environment.