Posted on Wed, Jun. 01, 2005
Pentagon
envisions electronic office assistant for busy human
bosses
BY
ROBERT S. BOYD
Knight
Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON
- (KRT) - With
a strong push from the Pentagon, computer scientists are trying
to
create an artificial "personal office assistant" that's smart
enough to
handle routine tasks for a human boss, military or
civilian.
The
researchers aim to build an electronic system that understands
human
language, takes and remembers instructions, learns from its
experiences
and copes with unexpected
situations.
It
won't make
coffee, but it also won't grumble or demand a
raise.
The
automated
aide-de-camp is supposed to be able to sort e-mail, schedule
meetings,
make plane reservations, collect information for reports and
carry out
other humdrum, time-consuming chores for busy human
managers.
Although the
duties seem routine, creating a software program that can handle
them is
one of the most difficult challenges in computer science.
Artificial-intelligence experts have struggled for years to make
machines perform functions that are simple for people but stump
electronic devices.
Today's
increasing computing speed and power, however, make things that
were
impossible five or 10 years ago more practical, researchers
said.
"Progress has been slow but steady," Eric Mathews, the associate
director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the
The
office
assistant program is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects
Agency, a Pentagon unit that pioneered such once blue-sky
developments
as the Internet, stealth aircraft and microelectronic
machines.
DARPA
Director Anthony Tether told the House Science Committee last
month that
his agency is moving into the field of "cognitive computing,"
meaning
computer systems that "perceive, reason and learn," not just
crunch
numbers and manipulate data. The Pentagon project is called PAL,
an
acronym for "personalized assistant that
learns."
"Cognitive
systems that learn to adapt to their users could dramatically
improve a
wide range of military operations," said Ronald Brachman, the
director
of DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office. "They could
learn
and even improve on their own."
The
PAL
program aims to "make military decision-making more efficient
and more
effective at all levels, from the individual soldier to the
high-level
commander, and to reduce risk for humans," Brachman said. The
system is
supposed to "perform well in specific scenarios that are exactly
like
those that a human executive assistant would
face."
For
work on
PAL, DARPA so far has granted $22 million to SRI International,
a
research organization in
Researchers
at these and other organizations already have produced numerous
more or
less successful artificial-intelligence programs that can carry
out bits
and pieces of DARPA's vision. There are many language
translators,
speech recognizers, e-mail sorters, report summarizers, calendar
managers and the like on the market. The PAL project is an
ambitious
attempt to integrate these scattered systems into a
whole.
"It
forces
researchers from different subfields to work together on
problems we
associate with human-level intelligence," John Laird, a computer
science
professor at the
Among other
skills, DARPA wants its office assistant to be able
to:
_Learn by
observing a human partner or by being told something
directly.
_Be
aware of
events as they happen.
_Decide what
to do and act in real time.
_Remember its
experiences and recall them when
needed.
"We
are
making progress in all areas, but the predominant emphasis and
progress
is in (computer) learning," DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker
said.
Some computer
scientists are skeptical that DARPA, despite its many
technological
breakthroughs, can make an artificial office assistant helpful
in the
real world.
The
goal is
"highly unrealistic," said Bram van Heuveln, the director of the
Minds
and Machines Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
"Trying to
get a computer system to perform these kinds of mundane tasks
has
plagued AI (artificial intelligence) research from the very
start," van
Heuveln said. "Some say this is just a matter of producing
faster and
more powerful processors, but I myself think the problem is much
deeper.
Powerful and reusable cognitive-processing technology is not in
the
offing anytime soon, certainly not in the next few
years."
Laird
disagreed: "It is very realistic to expect that software using
AI
techniques will aid office management in the next few years
where there
is a real need, not just in the office but also the
battlefield."
SRI's part of
the project is called CALO, short for a "cognitive agent that
learns and
organizes." In Latin, "calo" means a soldier's servant. It runs
on a
personal computer, a laptop or, with limitations, a cell
phone.
CALO already
has learned how to suggest folders in which a human boss might
like his
or her incoming e-mail filed. It knows how to schedule meetings
among
four groups of four people each.
The
system
will have cameras that can keep track of who's attending a
meeting and
remember who was there for future reference, said
"This is a
really cool machine-learning technique," Drummond said. "The
system
learns while it's being used."
Carnegie
Mellon's personal assistant is called RADAR, after the young
corporal on
the old "M*A*S*H" TV show who always
seemed
to know what was going to happen before the officers
did.
"Like any
good assistant, RADAR must understand its human master's
activities and
preferences and how they change over time," said Scott Fahlman,
a
computer scientist at the university's Human-Computer
Interaction
Institute.
For
example,
Fahlman said in a Carnegie Mellon release: "RADAR must respond
to
specific instructions such as `Notify me as soon as the new
budget
numbers arrive by e-mail.' It must know when to interrupt its
master
with a question and when to
defer."