Experiences with the Design, Fielding, and Evaluation of a Real-Time Communications Agent
- Eric Horvitz ,
- Raman Sarin ,
- Paul Koch ,
- Yong Rui
MSR-TR-2003-98 |
We review the design and evaluation of a fielded communications agent that routes telephone calls for several hundred people at our organization. In an advanced mode of operation, the system performs a cost-benefit analysis to balance the priority of calls with the context-sensitive cost of interrupting users. We discuss the challenges with developing a communications agent spanning client-side software and telephony infrastructure. We focus on metaphors and tools that allow users to specify priorities and costs of interruption. We report on the results analysis of surveys and monitored logs of preferences and activities.
Information Agents: Directions and Futures (2001)
In this internal Microsoft video, produced in 2001 and released publicly in 2020, research scientist Eric Horvitz provides glimpses of a set of research systems developed within Microsoft’s research division between 1998 and 2001. Projects featured in the video include Priorities, Lookout, Notification Platform, DeepListener, and Bestcom. The projects show early uses of machine learning, perception, and reasoning aimed at supporting people in daily tasks and at making progress on longer-term missions of augmenting human intellect. The efforts are thematically related in their pursuit of broader understandings of people and context, including a person’s attention, goals, activities, and location, via multimodal signals, involving the analysis of multiple streams of information. Several of the prototype systems were built within the Attentional User Interface (AUI) project, which…