| dc.description.abstract | Intelligent software personal assistants for human organizations are an
active research area within the multi-agent community. However, while
many capabilities for these software personal assistants are imagined or
already developed, there has been no quantification of how an
organization's performance is improved by software personal assistants.
Moreover, while intuitively organizations will adapt to take advantage of
the new technology, there has been no work looking at how organizations
should or will change in response to the new technology.
This project presents a first step toward addressing this oversight by
measuring the potential capabilities of epassist which is a Personal
Assistant or Agent' that will execute tasks on ones behalf on request.
The impact of agents to organizations has been explored in this project
by implementing this agent tool in three branch offices of this
organization and through various scientific methods, parameters
analyzed with very impressive results. Preliminary results show that
managing task contingencies can greatly reduce cognitive load besides
improve organizational task performance significantly. Although the
system provides a number of automated functions, the overall framework
is highly user-centric in its support for human needs, responsiveness to
human inputs, and adaptability to users working style and preferences. | en |
