The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Intelligent software personal assistants are an active research area with the potential to revolutionize the way that human organizations operate, but there has been little research quantifying how they will impact organizational performance or how organizations will or should adapt in response. In this chapter we develop a computational model of the organization to evaluate the impact different proposed assistant abilities have on the behavior and performance of the organization. By varying the organizational structures under consideration, we can identify which abilities are most beneficial, as well as explore how organizations may adapt to best leverage the new technology. The results indicate that the most beneficial abilities for hierarchical organizations are those that improve load balancing through task allocation and failure recovery, while for horizontal organizations the most beneficial abilities are those that improve communication. The results also suggest that software personal assistant technology will facilitate more horizontal organizations.

Notes

Sponsor: U.S. Army Research Labs

Grant ID: W911NF-06-3-0001

Associated Lab(s)/Group(s): Intelligent Software Agents

Associated Project(s): IBM ITA: Human-Agent Teamwork Models

Text Reference

Steven Okamoto, Katia Sycara, and Paul Scerri, "Personal Assistants for Human Organizations," Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems, Virginia Dignum, ed., GI-Global (http://www.igi-pub.com/) Handbook of Research, Information Science Reference, 2009,

BibTeX Reference

@incollection{Sycara_2009_6141,
   author = "Steven Okamoto, Katia Sycara, and Paul Scerri",
   editor = "Virginia Dignum",
   title = "Personal Assistants for Human Organizations",
   publisher = "GI-Global (http://www.igi-pub.com/) Handbook of Research, Information Science Reference",
   address = "Hershey, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.",
   year = "2009",
}

The Robotics Institute

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