Improving Intelligent Assistants for Desktop Activities

Tasks have been identified as playing an important role to knowledge workers as high-level units for organizing their information. TaskTracer is a task-aware desktop system that leverages the semi-automatic association between tasks and information to provide intelligent assistance to the user. TaskPredictor is a component that attempts to automatically predict the current task of the user. Our experience with TaskPredictor tells us that there still remain challenges to increasing acceptance by users. We describe our approaches to reduce the number of interruptions to the user, and to improve the accuracy of predictions. Projects, Activities, and Tasks Projects, tasks, activities, and to-do items have been identified as playing an important role to knowledge workers, i.e. computer users who create and process information as part of their work [2, 5, 7, 9]. These activities are conceptual structuring devices – they are the units into which a person divides their work, and the names a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICIA
• Authors: Simone Stumpf, Margaret M. Burnett, Thomas G. Dietterich
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, ICIA 2007, Important Role, Knowledge Workers, Tasks Projects