Carnegie Mellon
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Business Meeting Organizer
A Multi-Agent Meeting Scheduler using Mobile ContextKathleen Yang
Neha Pattan [email protected]
Alejandro Rivera [email protected]
Martin Griss [email protected]
Carnegie Mellon
Agenda
•Problem•Vision•Related Work•Solution•Architecture•Implementation•Experimental results•Conclusion•Q&A
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Carnegie Mellon
The problem…
Organizing meetings with multiple people
•When to meet?•Where to meet?•Who must attend the meeting?
•When to reschedule?
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Carnegie Mellon
Vision
Business Meeting Organizer
•Schedules meetings•Co-ordinates common time slots and venues
•Tracks context of attendees
•Reschedules meetings4
Carnegie Mellon
Related Work
• Lin J.H., J. Wu and S.L. Lai “Ameetzer”• Agent based meeting modeling to automate the task of scheduling meetings
• Chen, H. “An intelligent broker architecture for context aware systems”
• Broker architecture to maintain a shared model of the context
• Haynes T., S. Sen, N. Arora and R. Nadela.: “An automated meeting scheduling system that utilizes user preferences”
• Adopting user preferences in meeting scheduling systems
• Griss, M., Letsinger, R., Cowan D., Vanhilst, M. and R. Kessler: “CoolAgent: Intelligent Digital Assistants for Mobile”
• Adaptation of multi agent based meeting schedulers to changing environment
• Crawford, E. and M. Veloso: “Opportunities for learning in multi-agent meeting scheduling”
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Carnegie Mellon
Goals
• Mobile client that interacts with end user
• Each user owns a software agent that acts like the user’s Personal Secretary
• Agents communicate and negotiate meetings on behalf of their owners
• Agent is responsible for tracking owner and notifying other secretaries
• Agent has access to owner’s personal data, calendar and contacts
• Agent executes as per owner’s preferences
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Carnegie Mellon
Business Meeting Organizer
•Multi agent based solution •Architecture•Implementation
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Carnegie Mellon
Solution
Agent NegotiationUser
Agent A
User
Agent B
Proposal
Negotiation
Confirmation
A B
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Architecture (1/2)
Agent
Behaviors
HTTP Server Behavior 1
Calendar Contacts Preferences
Behavior 2 SMS Sender
Services
…
HTTP SMS
InternetInternet
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Carnegie Mellon
Architecture (2/2)
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Carnegie Mellon
Implementation (1/2)
•Multi-agent environment•Privacy maintained through strict rules•Based on user preferences•Integration of location
–Computes the time to travel between meetings
–Agrees to a meeting only if the time to travel is less than available time between meetings: both before and after proposed meeting
–Sends a reminder on time to user to start travelling to next meeting
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Carnegie Mellon
Implementation (2/2)
•Details about meeting reminder– Agent queries for user’s location every 5 minutes
– Client application on user’s cell phone sends an update to the agent, consisting of GPS co-ordinates
– Agent tracks most recent location of user– Agent computes time to travel to next meeting– Agent sends a reminder 10 minutes before the time when user should start travelling to next meeting
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Carnegie Mellon
Experimental Results
•Time Consumption•Calendar Privacy•Context Awareness
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Carnegie Mellon
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Time Consumption Comparison
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Tools Negotiation time (minutes)
Request pending time (minutes)
Meeting #1 BMO 1 0 Meeting #2 Google
calendar2 0
Meeting #3 Email 7 50 Meeting #4 Telephone 11 0 Meeting #5 Face-to-
face5 0
Four Participants
Carnegie Mellon
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Calendar Privacy Comparison
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Tools Calendar visible to others
Meeting #1 BMO No Meeting #2 Google
calendarYes
Meeting #3 Email No Meeting #4 Telephone No Meeting #5 Face-to-face No
Four Participants
Carnegie Mellon
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Context Awareness Comparison
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Tools Location Calendar
Meeting #1
BMO Continuous Continuous
Meeting #2
Google calendar
No Continuous
Meeting #3
Email One shot One shot
Meeting #4
Telephone One shot One shot
Meeting #5
Face-to-face
One shot One shot
Four Participants
Carnegie Mellon
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Conclusion
•Time spent using BMO is a fraction of that using manual techniques like email and phone calls
•Manual techniques do not scale well for meetings with several attendees, BMO does!
•BMO scores over other techniques in terms of–Efficiency–Privacy–Context Awareness
Carnegie Mellon
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Q & A