Visitor-hoster: Towards an intelligent electronic secretary

The ubiquity of network-based information resources have given impetus for the development of intelligent software agents that will be able to (1) extract task-relevant information automatically or with little help from human users from various on-line information resources, (2) resolve the potential con icts among acquired knowledge from di erent information resources, and (3) more importantly, collectively solve tasks requested by human users e ectively without interrupting/bothering users too much. In this preliminary report, we brie y present an implemented intelligent information system aimed at helping a human secretary organize a visit in an academic environment. The task of hosting a visitor involves arranging the visitor's schedule with faculty that match the interests that the visitor has expressed in his/her visit request. In our system, called Visitor-Hoster, various information agents are utilized to retrieve task-related information from several real-world heterogeneous data resources, such as internet-based finger, on-line electronic library, etc.