Enhancing intelligent user assistance in collaborative design environments

This paper presents some results of our ongoing research on enhancing intelligent user assistance in collaborative design environments. The proposed intelligent assistant agent is composed of a user model, an inference component, a knowledge update component, and a collaboration component. The user model is divided into a user interest model and a user behavior model in order to capture the user's interests and user's actions related to the goal separately in the application domain. The detailed design of the user model has been reported previously. This paper focuses on the design and implementation of the collaboration component. It addresses issues on how the intelligent assistant agent reasons on the user interest model and the user behavior model by utilizing the collaboration component to find out the user's potential collaborators, and what collaboration strategy is used to choose a collaborator with the highest utility.