TaskPort: A Task Management Interface in an Intelligent Cognitive Assistant System

People are spending an increasing amount of time handling everyday routine tasks in their daily lives. To help people work more efficiently, Carnegie Mellon University is currently developing the RADAR (Reflective Agent with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning) system, a software-based cognitive personal assistant. The task manager is an essential component of the RADAR system that manages high-level tasks and coordinates communications among other intelligent assistants in a personal space. The task manager interface is an application that would not only allow the users to browse, create and modify tasks, but also provide more intelligent functionalities regarding task management. In this paper, we discuss the motivation, and an implementation of such task manager interface, called TaskPort. To better understand the elements that provide an edge in efficiency and productivity for the user, we explore various techniques used in the task manager interface and attempt to resolve several interesting challenges, such as flexibility, usability, scalability, and integration.