Defining a Task's Temporal Domain for Intelligent Calendar Applications

摘要

Intelligent calendar assistants have many years ago attracted researchers from the areas of scheduling, machine learning and human computer interaction. However, all efforts have concentrated on automating the meeting scheduling process, leaving personal tasks to be decided manually by the user. Recently, an attempt to automate scheduling personal tasks within an electronic calendar application resulted in the deployment of a system called SELFPLANNER. The system allows the user to define tasks with duration, temporal domain and other attributes, and then automatically accommodates them within her schedule by employing constraint satisfaction algorithms. Both at the design phase and while using the system, it has been made clear that the main bottleneck in its use is the definition of a task's temporal domain. To alleviate this problem, a new approach based on a combination of template application and manual editing has been designed. This paper presents the design choices underlying temporal domain definition in SelfPlanner and some computational problems that we had to deal with.