Collectively, they'll be immensely valuable by reducing personnel costs and improving efficiency. VMattie The particular demonstration task we've chosen is to produce an agent, Virtual Mattie, that each week emails an announcement of the next week's seminars scheduled in an academic department. VMattie will communicate with human seminar organizers by email, compose seminar announcements, send them in a timely fashion to a mailing list that she maintains. She'll also dun organizers for their information when it's not forthcoming, and mail addenda and errata as needed. In a latter incarnation, she'll also handle one-time colloquia.
Understanding requires inferencing.
The task also requires keeping track of dates and deadlines, of default seminar information, and of email addresses of both organizers and listees. And, VMatiie must compose and send email messages of several types such as announcements, addenda, errata, reminders, and acknowledgments. These tasks are by no means trivial, given the current state of our knowledge of software agents. Much should be learned while solving the problems that will inevitably arise with human-VMattie communication, and with implementing the underlying architecture. Development of VMattie requires us to formulate, implement and observe a new, high-level software agent architecture.