Defining a Task's Temporal Domain for Intelligent Calendar Applications

Abstract Intelligent calendar assistants have many years ago attracted research-ers from the areas of scheduling, machine learning and human computer interac-tion. However, all efforts have concentrated on automating the meeting schedul-ing process, leaving personal tasks to be decided manually by the user. Recently, an attempt to automate scheduling personal tasks within an electronic calendar application resulted in the deployment of a system called SELFPLANNER. The sys-tem allows the user to define tasks with duration, temporal domain and other attributes, and then automatically accommodates them within her schedule by employing constraint satisfaction algorithms. Both at the design phase and while using the system, it has been made clear that the main bottleneck in its use is the definition of a task’s temporal domain. To alleviate this problem, a new approach based on a combination of template application and manual editing has been de-signed. This paper presents the design choices underlying temporal domain defini-tion in SELFPLANNER and some computational problems that we had to deal with.