Adaptive Personal Assistant (APA)

BCL proposes developing an Adaptive Personal Assistant (APA) to assist professionals dramatically improve productivity of office automation tasks. The APA will take normal spoken English requests and perform tasks such as electronic mail, meeting coordination, and flight scheduling, and then adapt and optimize the output according to the user's preferences. In addition, the system will take the user's selections from the output list and adjust the preferences dynamically using relevance feedback techniques. The APA is built on an agent based architecture; a primary agent interfaces with the user, translating requests into the agent languages of KQML and KIF. These KQML and KIF statements are sent to task-specific agents to execute the requests. On request completion, each agent shows results in its own display, and a message is sent back to the primary agent for response in a computer generated voice. This design allows for a scalable APA architecture. As new tasks need to be added, a new agent is registered with the primary agent. This modular design of the APA allows it to be extended to the control of computer based military applications including military office applications, command and control applications and embedded computer systems.