CMRadar: A Personal Assistant Agent For Calendar Management

Abstract

One of the more compelling visions for agents research is the development of “personal assistant agents” that are tasked with making people and organizations more efficient by autonomously handling routine tasks on behalf of their users. Most recently, several researchers including ourselves have embarked on a large research project, called The Radar Project, whose overall goal is to develop a personalized agent that is able to assist its user in a wide range of everyday tasks. Within this larger project, we are concerned with the more focused task of managing a user’s calendar. While isolated aspects of calendar management have been investigated before, in this paper, we present CMRadar, a complete agent with capabilities ranging across the full spectrum of calendar management, from natural language processing of incoming scheduling-related emails, to making autonomous scheduling decisions, to negotiating with other users, to user interfacing and visualization. Although many research issues remain, we believe CMRadar is the first end-to-end agent for automated calendar management.