TOWARD INTELLIGENT MEETING AGENTS

An experiment with an AI-based software agent shows that it can help u sers organize and consolidate ideas from electronic brainstorming. The agent recalled concepts as effectively as experienced human meeting f acilitators and in a fifth of the time. Agent software enhances the pr oductivity of groupware by helping perform convergent tasks, thus free ing users for more creative work. The result is a significant time sav ings over groupware without agents. We validated the performance of an intelligent agent, which can reason about a task and learn from task performance. Our intelligent agent supports the Group Systems electron ic meeting system developed by the University of Arizona. The agent or ganizes ideas from brainstorming sessions into category lists for furt her discussion, a task often difficult for human electronic meeting fa cilitators.