Integrating Reasoning into Everyday Applications:
Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium
Michael Kassoff, Chair
October 13–15, 2006, Arlington, Virginia
Technical Report FS-06-04
44 pp., $25.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-302-7
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Applications such as e-mail clients, web browsers, spreadsheets, and personal finance programs have become an integral part of modern daily life. The user base of some of these programs are in the hundreds of millions of users. Intelligent reasoners can aid the users of these programs in several ways. First, they can automate routine, repetitive, or tedious tasks, freeing the user from doing so himself. Second, they can script time-critical actions to be taken by the application, even if the user is unavailable or not fast enough to do so himself. Finally, they can be used to constrain aspects of the program's behavior to meet the user's needs. For example, e-mail filtering rules save the user from having to send e-mail from a known spammer to the trash can and can take timely action such as automatically forwarding important e-mail to a coworker while the user is disconnected from the Internet. Or rules can specify constraints or preferences on what type of music an mp3 player should play during particular times of the day, or what types of programs a digital video recorder should record. These rules might be directly specified by the end user or learned automatically by the application. Furthermore, the application might be called upon to explain its actions, which requires further reasoning.
Looking to the future, the promise of the semantic web has opened up the possibility of "scripting the world," as intelligent reasoners can reference arbitrary conditions on the web and produce corresponding side-effects on the web. Furthermore, the semantic desktop movement promises to integrate ontologies and metadata into the everyday desktop environment. This symposium is concerned with all aspects of making intelligent reasoners accessible to everyday users, and in incorporating reasoners into everyday applications.