Title
Electric Elves: Agent Technology for Supporting Human Organizations
Abstract
The operation of a human organization requires dozens of everyday tasks to ensure coherence in organizational activities, monitor the status of such activities, gather information relevant to the organization, keep everyone in the organization informed, and so on. Teams of software agents can aid humans in accomplishing these tasks, facilitating the organization's coherent functioning and rapid response to crises and reducing the burden on humans. Based on this vision, this article reports on ELECTRIC ELVES, a system that has been operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at our research institute since 1 June 2000. Tied to individual user workstations, fax machines, voice, and mobile devices such as cell phones and palm pilots, ELECTRIC ELVES has assisted us in routine tasks, such as rescheduling meetings, selecting presenters for research meetings, tracking people's locations, organizing lunch meetings, and so on. We discuss the underlying AI technologies that led to the success Of ELECTRIC ELVES, including technologies devoted to agent-human interactions, agent coordination, the accessing of multiple heterogeneous information sources, dynamic assignment of organizational tasks, and the deriving of information about organization members. We also report the results of deploying ELECTRIC ELVES in our own research organization.
Year
DOI
Venue
2002
10.1609/aimag.v23i2.1637
AI MAGAZINE
Keywords
Field
DocType
mobile device,human interaction,organizations,software agent,information systems,systems engineering
Information system,Palm pilots,Everyday tasks,Simulation,Computer science,Software agent,Workstation,Mobile device,Artificial intelligence
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
23
2
0738-4602
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
30
2.08
22
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hans Chalupsky135844.48
Yolanda Gil24491413.53
Craig A. Knoblock35229680.57
Kristina Lerman42840217.86
Jean Oh531037.00
David V. Pynadath61556130.56
Thomas A. Russ719226.11
Milind Tambe86008522.25