Mixed-Initiative Scheduling of Tasks in User Collaboration

This paper describes an intelligent, mixed-initiative scheduler which supports users in the organization and revision of their calendars, helping them to allocate personal and shared activities involving other collaborators. Our scheduler exploits well-known temporal reasoning techniques to suggest complete schedules, as well as to guide the user in the exploration of the possible changes to the timing of tasks, in order to enable her/him to modify the calendar in an informed way. We have integrated our scheduler into a Collaborative Task Manager service supporting the management of projects and distributed tasks.