Software-based Assistant for Personal Information Management

1
Software-based Assistant for Personal
Information Management

• By Nuno Magalhaes Ribeiro
• Hypermedia Multimedia Group
• Department of Computer Science
• The University of York
• nribeiro_at_cs.york.ac.uk
• Supervisor Dr. Ian Benest
• Assessor Dr. Patrick Olivier
• December 14, 1998

2
Motivation

• I enter my office for the first time today. My
  computer screen is blank as always.
• My computer senses me and asks me (through
  speech) if I want to read my new e-mail.
• I say Not right now, I have an important call to
  make first !
• I dial the number and wait for the connection
  while thinking of everyone I must call to
  tomorrows important project meeting. Id like
  to have every thinking brain with me to help me
  decide what to do next, I think.
• In a moment I am on the phone with Paul, the
  project leader of my group, telling him the names
  of everyone I want to meet Julia, Mike, Joan,
• Suddenly, my computer screen displays a space
  ship moving around and the four letters that
  compose a foreign nameJOSE
• Oh..and Paul, please dont forget to also invite
  that new project member, Jose, you know the one
  that wrote that interesting report about
  spaceships fuels. O.K. Bye, bye. See you
  tomorrow.
• I handle the phone and briefly think I almost
  forgot to tell him about Jose, before leaving my
  office thinking about the ideas I read in that
  report and how to make the most of them

3
Identifying the Problem

• Maes, 97 mismatch between the complexity of
  our lives and our cognitive abilities
• too many things to keep track of
• information overload
• learn and remember more information
• The amount of (personal) information is
  increasing at a fast pace
• difficult to remember information (what we know
  but cant recall)
• difficult to find existing information (what we
  need but cant find)
• time consuming for us to manage every piece of
  information we gather

4
An approach to tackle the problem

• Bush, 45 A recordmust be continuously
  extended, it must be stored, and above all it
  must be consulted.
• Lamming et al., 94 a memory prostheses should
  become a companion in everyday life,
  automatically capturing data that may be of use
  later
• Bell, 97 one can imaginea guardian angel
  that can capture and retrieve everything we hear,
  read and see.
• Maes, 97 prosthetics for the mind (memory
  augmentation devices) in order to overcome our
  cognitive limitations
• poor memory for details
• only deal with one thing at a time
• slow to process large amounts of information

5
Notion of a Shadow Assistant
Bush, 45, Lamming et al, 94, Maes, 97,
Bell, 97

• A shadow assistant stays in the background and
  observes what we do without interfering, learns
  about us and our tasks and augments our memory.
• 1 Observes the user and gathers information
• monitors the information the user is collecting
• captures relevant data about the context of
  users tasks
• 2 Uses this information to assist
• offers to automate mechanistic tasks
• helps recall important details about information
  needed for a task
• suggests relevant information to a task

6
Why is context important in PIM?

• Lansdale, 88 poor memory for details.
• Therefore, systems which rely on the user to
  remember details such as filenames are bound to
  produce low levels of recall. Lansdale, 88
• Recall will be best when the cues present at the
  time of learning and at the time of recall are
  most alike. Tulving, 83 (Encoding Specificity
  Principle)
• physical location of an event, who was there,
  what was happening at the same time and what
  happened imediately before and after. Tulving,
  83
• presenting partial context information about an
  episode helps people remember more about it.
  Tulving, 83 (reconstructing the context).
• associate our current environment with past
  experiences that might be related, in order to
  suggest existing relevant information to our
  current task. Rhodes, 97 (context matching).

7
What is a Personal Assistant?

• Hoschka, 96 ...some functions of good human
  assistance
• Lennon and Vermeer, 95 It thus supports the
  user at all levels of activitymaking predictions
  from repetitive tasks, it saves us both time and
  frustrationit will be our augmented eyes and
  ears, an alter ego we create for ourselves

8
What is an Automated Personal Assistant?

• FIPA, 97 Overview of the Personal Assistant
  Domain
• Software Agent
• acts semi-autonomously on behalf of a user (wo
  human guidance)
• models the interests of the user,
• provides services to the user or other
  people/personal assistants,
• accomplishes routine support tasks (real job),
• is unobtrusive but ready when needed.

9
What is an Automated Personal Assistant?

• Interface Agents
• learn from, act on behalf of and collaborate with
  the user Maes, 94
• and
• Information Agents
• look, find and compose information Nwana, 96
• An Automated Personal Assistant is a software
  agent that both exhibits Interface Agents
  properties and performs Information Agents
  tasks.

10
Analysis of existing approachesto capture users
activities context

• Issues
• 1 What contextual information about users tasks
  is gathered?
• 2 How is this contextual information used?
• Survey brings together a set of papers which
  common purpose is
• to collect context elements,
• to provide ways to explore these elements to help
  retrieving information (once known but know
  forgotten).

11
What context information about users tasks is
gathered?
Memoirs Lansdale and Edmonds, 92
Forget-Me-Not Lamming and Flynn, 94, Lamming
et al., 94
Hive Bovey, 96
Lifestreams Freeman, 96
Remembrance Agent Rhodes, 97, Crabtree and
Rhodes, 98
12
Analysis

• Common characteristic time
• temporal relations between events helps recall.
• although precise data about an episode is not
  usually remembered, temporal relations between
  episodes are remembered very well Lamming et
  al., 94.
• The more information a system collects about
  context of users activities, the more help it
  can be to recall details.
• Forget-Me-Not, Hive,Remembrance Agent
• a system that is sensitive to context (location
  and people) can provide reminders / suggestions
  appropriate to current activities.
• Indexing documents by context improves recall
  (document retrieval).
• context as a retrieval key (only events / groups
  of events, not tasks)

13
How is contextual information used?

• 1 Retrieve by context reconstruction (you tell
  what you remember)
• User searches for information by specifying
  remembered context details,
• System matches users details with existing
  stored context elements,
• System presents users with a subset of events
  that matches details,
• Users browse existing events and select those
  relevant.
• 2 Suggest by context matching (you automatically
  receive suggestions)
• Remembrance Agent, pro-actively matches current
  user context with stored contexts about past
  experiences,
• makes automatic suggestions (only works for text
  processing).
• Useful utilisation of context elements,
  particularly in the case of pro-active
  suggestions if we can extend the idea to
  activities other than text processing.

14
Critique
What we did
Why we did it
How we did it
What caused it
High Level
What resulted
What did we want
What problems did we solve
It is much more difficult, but also much more
useful because it would allow the shadow
assistant to know what we were doing Index by
Tasks
Is it possible to infer High Level events from
Low Level events?
When we did it
Who was there
Where we were
What was happening
Low Level
It is possible today, but not extremely
useful Index by Events
15
Open Issues

• How to infer users tasks from low-level events?
• What is relevant information about each users
  context?
• Do we want to be constantly observed? (Privacy)
• What if our personal information falls in the
  wrong hands?
• What happens if we can remember everything all
  the time? Bos, 95
• Where can observations take place?
• Do we want a humanised interface?