On Scheduling Events and Tasks by an Intelligent Calendar Assistant

In the last decade various research efforts and commercial offerings have sought to provide levels of automated assistance with time management. Besides basic calendaring, collaboration, and communication, many of these efforts concern event negotiation or scheduling, while others concern task management and monitoring. When automated scheduling is employed, most often events and tasks are treated separately, with the latter being kept out of the user’s calendar. One consequence can be missing deadlines or even not accomplishing some tasks. Based on experience in developing and deploying an automated task management system and an event scheduling system, this paper sets the requirements for an intelligent calendar assistant that treats tasks and events in a unified way, schedules all of them within the user’s calendar, and reschedules them whenever needed. We outline a set of attributes used to represent the overall combined scheduling problem, together with a set of criteria used to represent users' preferences and evaluate alternative schedules.