A Personal Information Management Assistant

This is a response to Regina Barzilay's talk. Although it is hard for computer to do what human do in the physical world (e.g. play soccer, or cook dinners) because of the problem of perception and control, it is much easier for them to accomplish tasks in the cyber space. Here we will propose a personal assistant that helps users accomplish tasks they can do with a computer. Specifically, we will focus on information search and management tasks. In order to allow assistants to exhibit complex behavior, we further introduce a type of reinforcement learner called relation machines.