Gary's Talk Weh 4601 Gary Pelton Feb 15 4.30 A computer agent must be able to accomplish some of its tasks even when facing a large number of possibly interacting tasks. This proposal investigates how an agent can start on a task and then set it aside for later continuation. Setting aside a task in this manner allows the agent to both complete more tasks and handle more tasks. My agent uses its experience in doing a task to decide when to set aside (called suspending) the task, and its knowledge about how to do a task to remember (called reactivation) the task at the appropriate times. My agent suspends a task when progress on the task is not feasible, and reactivates the task either when progress is possible again or when another task is in conflict with the suspended task. By suspending important tasks, my agent can interleave work on other less important tasks with work on the important tasks, thus completing more tasks. The agent can handle more tasks, because the suspension process removes a task from being considered by the agent until its reactivation, thus making the choice of the next task simpler. This proposal describes an agent doing everyday tasks and how it suspends and reactivates these tasks. Everyday tasks provide many opportunities for testing the agent's ability to appropriately remember suspended tasks because; the tasks exist over a period of time, the tasks have many types of suspension opportunities, and conflicting tasks can arise at any time. This agent will be measured to see the effect of simultaneous tasks on the agent's computational complexity as the agent completes thousands of its tasks. These measurements will be taken as both the number of tasks grow (up to hundreds), and the number of interactions between those tasks grow. These measurements will help characterize the applicability of the research to other agents.