Design and implementation of a personal assistant using agent technology

Abstract

Intelligent agents are rapidly gaining popularity in our increasingly networked world since their emergence at the beginning of the last decade as a promising design and implementation solution for future applications. They provide information monitoring, searching filtering, and decision aiding that help people focus on the information that is most pertinent to them in a particular context. One central class of agents is personal assistants. They can be distinguished from ordinary agents by the fact that they work at the interface level rather than the application level. They model their owners' interests, provide services to them, and act on their behalf when required. Their domains of application include Internet information retrieval, E-commerce, telecommunication, and network management. This thesis aims to present a general model of personal assistants using agent technology. The proposed model aims to efficiently provide all necessary functionality regardless of the application. Our system architecture consists of three distinct agents. They are the User Interface Agent, Information Management Agent, and Personal Agent. They communicate with each other, with the human user, and with other agents using Agent Communication Language in order to provide services to their owners. The model was applied in the Virtual Team Collaboration project as an agent that helps the user managing his Agenda, managing the team, scheduling meetings, and acting on the user's behalf. The thesis work show also how can we use our model of personal assistant in E-commerce.