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University researchers creating virtual secretary funded by DARPA ($7MM)

It won’t get coffee, but then again, you wouldn’t have to send it a card on Secretaries’ Day.

DeseretNews.com

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are developing a virtual secretary. Nicknamed RADAR, for Reflective Agents with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning, the software would schedule meetings, write reports and manage e-mail to make its human boss more productive.

"Like any good assistant, RADAR must understand its human master’s activities and preferences and how they change over time," said Scott Fahlman, the school’s principal computer science researcher. "RADAR must respond to specific instructions — ‘Notify me as soon as the new budget numbers arrive by e-mail’ — without the need for reprogramming."

Researchers will use techniques from fields such as machine learning, human-computer interaction, natural language processing and behavioral studies of human managers. They’ll compare the software with human assistants performing the same tasks.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military agency that years ago gave birth to the Internet, awarded the university an initial $7 million as part of a five-year contract.

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,510044194,00.html

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