Capturing Common Knowledge about Tasks

Abstract

Although to-do lists are a ubiquitous form of personal task management, there has been no work on intelligent assistance to automate, elaborate, or coordinate a user’s to-dos. Our research focuses on three aspects of intelligent assistance for to-dos. We investigated the use of intelligent agents to automate to-dos in an office setting. We collected a large corpus from users and developed a paraphrase-based approach to matching agent capabilities with to-dos. We also investigated to-dos for personal tasks and the kinds of assistance that can be offered to users by elaborating on them on the basis of substep knowledge extracted from the Web. Finally, we explored coordination of user tasks with other users through a to-do management application deployed in a popular social networking site. We discuss the emergence of Social Task Networks, which link users‘ tasks to their social network as well as to relevant resources on the Web. We show the benefits of using common sense knowledge to interpret and elaborate to-dos. Conversely, we also show that to-do lists are a valuable way to create repositories of common sense knowledge about tasks.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2012
Source ID
10.1145/2362394.2362397

Entities

People

  • Denny Vrandecic
  • Paul Groth
  • Timothy Chklovski
  • Varun Ratnakar
  • Yolanda Gil

Organizations

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
  • Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  • University of Southern California
  • Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Geospatial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence Analytics
  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.