Cognitive Personal Assistant
From: Computerworld - 06/07/2004
By: Thomas Hoffman

A computerized assistant that can schedule meetings, filter and prioritize
email, and carry out other mundane administrative chores using artificial
intelligence is under development by Carnegie Mellon University researchers.
CMU's Reflective Agent with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning (Radar) project is
designed to help harried managers suffering from an overabundance of
requests, explains computer science professor Scott Fahlman; in the first
year of Radar's development, over 25 researchers concentrated on training the
system to classify email and then make the most of its learning algorithms.
Fahlman says the system will completely automate some tasks, request the
confirmation of a supervisor for others, and generate suggestions and drafts
that users can agree to or change as required. Fahlman says "a huge
opportunity" exists for Radar systems to communicate with each other to set
up meetings and extract data or send it to a corporate Web site, although the
system's user is the one who ultimately controls the distribution of
information. Radar will employ AI to effect symbolic and statistical
learning; Fahlman notes that much of the research into the application of AI
to natural-language comprehension has focused on problem-solving, and Radar
is "trying to move that work forward." Among the challenges that Fahlman and
CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute director Dan Siewiorek have had to
contend with is providing Radar with enough natural-language understanding,
and giving the system the ability to learn from its mistakes and build upon a
body of knowledge. Radar is currently being trained to learn via interaction
with text, but Siewiorek says the system could learn to comprehend human
speech later on. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding the
Radar project under the auspices of its Personalized Assistant that Learns
program. 

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646372,00.html