Intelligent Assistance for Desktop User Tasks

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                ***Joint Seminar***
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The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Human Language Technology Center

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Speaker:	Dr.Anthony TOMASIC
    		Carnegie-Mellon University

Title: 		"Intelligent Assistance for Desktop User Tasks"

Date:		Friday, 16 Jan 2009

Time:		11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:		Lecture Theater G
		(Chow Tak Sin Lecture Theater, near lift 25/26)
		HKUST


Abstract:

Today many workers find themselves caught between (a) a message centric
world of email filled with natural language and (b) the form and report
centric world of IT systems filled with structured information. Workers
spend many hours navigating interfaces in order to complete tedious update
and retrieval tasks to connect these worlds together. For example, an
office assistant will be asked via email to book a trip to Paris. First he
will retrieve information needed for the task, such as frequent flyer
account numbers and approved corporate hotels. Then he will use the e-mail
and retrieved information to complete the task. Fortunately, the
repetitive nature of many of these tasks makes them ripe for automation
using machine learning.

This talk will detail the design and evaluation of VIO, a system that
extracts information from email, automating update tasks. VIO monitors
emails and makes task suggestions. VIO allows users to quickly identify
and repair any suggestion errors, improving the machine learning
performance as it learns to automate tasks.  Our initial evaluation
demonstrates that this user-constructed agent can significantly reduce
task completion time, freeing workers from mundane tasks.


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Biography:

Anthony Tomasic is the Director of the Carnegie Mellon University Master
of Science in Information Technology, Very Large Information Systems
(VLIS) program. His research currently focuses on applying machine
learning to the desktop. Anthony has also published research on internet
scale database systems, federated databases, and the performance of
information retrieval systems. He has worked at Stanford University and
INRIA (Rocquencourt). He received his Ph.D. in 1994 from Princeton
University.