Intelligent User Interfaces for calendar management

Reasoning about time for calendar management can be complex, especially when handling multi-user events, because a possibly large number of temporal constraints might have to be analyzed to find solutions which satisfy the commitments of the involved people. Artificial Intelligence temporal reasoning techniques are the key to address this issue but, due to the personal nature of calendar management, they have to be applied in a model that grants the user control in the scheduling decisions to be made. This paper explores the use of Intelligent User Interfaces to mitigate the problem by supporting the management of a dialog between user and automated calendar manager during the scheduling process. The idea is that of enabling the user to steer the calendar manager in the selection of the scheduling solutions to be applied when a temporal conflict occurs. In this way, the user benefits from automated reasoning support but controls the system inferences on the basis of her/his own preferences. The paper also describes the results of a user test we carried out to assess the suitability of the proposed model.