Publication Details

Balancing the Needs of Personalization and Reasoning in a User-Centric Scheduling Assistant

by Berry, P. and Gervasio, M. and Peintner, B. and Yorke-Smith, N.

Technical Note 561
Institution: Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International
Address: 333 Ravenswood Ave, Menlo Park, CA 94025
Feb 2007.

Abstract

We describe the interaction of three aspects core to a personalized scheduling task. First, we develop a preference model designed to capture user preferences for the task of scheduling a meeting request between multiple people, and a methodology for preference elicitation to initially populate this model. Second, we explain a natural-language-based elicitation of the meeting request details and constraints, and outline the solving of the resulting constrained scheduling problem (with preferences). Third, we describe the display of solutions to the scheduling problem to the user, as candidate scheduling options with explanations, and detail unobtrusive learning of revisions to the preference model from the user’s choices among the candidates. We describe the user studies that informed our design choices, and assess the resulting system in terms of the quality of scheduling options presented, according to the user. The scheduling task enabled by the integration of these aspects has been implemented within a deployed application.

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Associated Projects

Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes As part of DARPA’s Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program, SRI and team members are working on developing a next-generation "Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes" (CALO).

AIC Personnel

	Name	Title	E-mail
	Berry, Pauline M	Alumnus
	Gervasio, Melinda	Senior Computer Scientist
	Peintner, Bart	Sr. Computer Scientist
	Yorke-Smith, Neil	Computer Scientist