Collaborative Interface Agents

Interface agents are semi-intelligent systems which assist users with daily computer-based tasks. Recently, various researchers have proposed a learning approach towards building such agents and some working prototypes have been demonstrated. Such agents learn by ‘ watching over the shoulder’ of the user and detecting patterns and regularities in the user’ s behavior. Despite the successes booked, a major problem with the learning approach is that the agent has to learn from scratch and thus takes some time becoming useful. Secondly, the agent’ s competence is necessarily limited to actions it has seen the user perform. Collaboration between agents assisting different users can alleviate both of these problems. We present a framework for multiagent collaboration and discuss results of a working prototype, based on learning agents for electronic mail.

Authors

• Yezdi Lashkari Max Metral

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