Improving Computer Supported Cooperative Design with Personal Assistant Agents

This paper describes how the concept of Personal Assistant Agent (PA) can be used to improve CSCW and to support knowledge management. We claim that available groupware and collaborative tools do not exploit domain knowledge efficiently enough. Here we describe a PA using domain knowledge to help a user in a collaborative environment. The PA records user's tasks on the fly, capturing knowledge. It uses domain knowledge to organize them, and offers help and suggestions regarding the user's work. A PA communicates with other PAs to exchange information about users and about how they solve problems. Therefore, one can reuse everyone's experiences. The interaction with a user occurs through window dialogs or by means of natural language. Our PAs are to be used in an educational environment to aid remote groups of students do collaborative mechanical engineering design.

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