Personal Assistant Agent and Content Manager for Ubiquitous Services

The greatest challenge facing the commercial realization of ubiquitous, mobile telecommunications is not related to the underlying transport or network protocols, but on the sheer complexity of technology presented to the user. Users will have multiple devices with varied characteristics and rich and diverse multimedia applications delivered over heterogeneous wireless environments. Device configuration, or even service selection, will be beyond the majority of customers. To address this issue, a user-centric system is proposed that aims to hide complexity from the user. Incorporating concepts of the personal distributed environment, the proposed system uses a personal assistant agent to interact with, and react to, the environment and a personal content manager to be aware of content types, device capabilities and manage a user's digital content on behalf of the user.