Industrial applications of intelligent systems at BTexact Keynote Address

Abstract

Soft computing techniques are beginning to penetrate into newapplication areas such as intelligent interfaces, information retrieval andintelligent assistants. The common characteristic of all these applications is thatthey are human-centred. Soft computing techniques are a natural way ofhandling the inherent flexibility with which humans communicate, requestinformation, describe events or perform actions.Today, people use computers as useful tools to search for information andcommunicate electronically. There have been a number of ambitious projects inrecent years including one at BTexact known as the Intelligent PersonalAssistant (IPA), with the aim of revolutionising the way we use computers inthe near future. The aim remains to build systems that act as our assistants andgo beyond being just useful tools. The IPA is an integrated system of intelligentsoftware agents that helps the user with communication, information and timemanagement. The IPA includes specialist assistants for e-mail prioritisation andtelephone call filtering (communication management), Web search andpersonalisation (information management), and calendar scheduling (timemanagement). Each such assistant is designed to have a model of the user and alearning module for acquiring user preferences. In this talk I focus on the IPA,its components and how we used computational intelligence techniques todevelop the system.