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Project Idea

My iCal Agent

November 1, 2003 - December 1, 2004

The goal is to create an autonomous agent to maintain a personalized calendar for its user by using the iCal framework

iCal is a standard for publishing and sharing personal calendars. Using iCal-based applications (e.g., iCal and Mozilla Calendar), users can publish their personal calendars on a public calendar server (e.g., .Mac or iCalX) and subscribe to public calendars that are published by other users.

The design of My iCal Agent will take advantage of this publish/subscribe model in iCal. As the agent's task is to continously monitor and discover calendar events that the user may be interested, it publishes its findings on a pre-defined iCal calendar that the user has previously subscribed to.

Key advantages of this iCal approach, as oppose to adding events directly into a user's personal calendar (e.g., Outlook) are the followings:

  • There is a clear seperation between the user's personal calendar events and the agent recommanded calendar events -- i.e. events are stored in two seperate calendars.
  • Multiple users can subscribed to the same iCal that is published by a My iCal Agent (e.g., an agent maintains a calendar for the entire research group members)
  • No extra software needs to be installed on the users' client machines. All necessary components are provided by the existing iCal-based applications

    If you are interested in this, contact Harry Chen

    agent, calendar

    OWL Tweet

    • Research Areas

    1. Context-Aware Computing
    2. Data Mining
    3. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
    4. Multi-Agent Systems
    5. Web services