An Automated Intelligent Meeting Scheduling System
Intelligent agents are being used widely and effectively to assist users in their information processing chores. We have developed a distributed negotiation mechanism by which automated scheduling agents can schedule meetings on behalf of their associated users. The meeting scheduler is implemented on a network of workstations. By using a simple graphical user interface, users can request meetings to be scheduled. These requests are processed by distributed agents communicating via e-mail. Users can also specify their preference/constraints on different meeting and calendar attributes. The scheduling agents intelligently adapts to user preferences and priorities of associated users with regards to meeting lengths, topics, attendees, days of the week, hours of the day, etc. The system is designed to be adaptive to environmental demands as well as to user preferences.

This project has been supported partially by a Research Initiation Award from the National Science Foundation.
Publications From This Project
Sandip Sen and Edmund H. Durfee, "A Formal Study of Distributed Meeting Scheduling" Group Decision and Negotiation, volume 7, pages 265-289, 1998.
Sandip Sen, "Developing an automated distributed meeting scheduler," IEEE Expert, vol. 12, no. 4, pages 41--45, July/August 1997.
Sandip Sen, Thomas Haynes, and Neeraj Arora, "Satisfying User Preferences While Negotiating Meetings", International Journal of Human-Computer Studies , vol. 47, pages 407-427, 1997 (special issue on Group Support Systems).
Thomas Haynes, Sandip Sen, Neeraj Arora, and Rajani Nadella, "An Automated Meeting Scheduling System that Utilizes User Preferences," in the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents'97) (pages 308-315), Marina del Ray, CA, 1997.
Sandip Sen and Edmund H. Durfee, "A Contracting Model for Flexible Distributed Scheduling" Annals of Operations Research, volume 65, pages 195-222, 1996.
Sandip Sen and Edmund H. Durfee, "Unsupervisesd Surrogate Agents and Search Bias Change in Flexible Distributed Scheduling" in the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multiagent Systems (pages 336-343), San Francisco, CA, June 1995.
Sandip Sen and Edmund H. Durfee, "The role of commitment in cooperative negotiation" International Journal on Intelligent & Cooperative Information Systems, vol. 3, no. 1, (pages 67-81), 1994.
Sandip Sen and Edmund H. Durfee, "On the design of an adaptive meeting scheduler" in the Proceedings of the Tenth IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications (pages 40-46), San Antonio, Texas, March 1994.