Scientists now attempting to create electronic ‘personal office assistant’

WASHINGTON – With a strong push from the Pentagon, computer scientists are trying to create an artificial “personal office assistant” that’s smart enough to handle routine tasks for a human boss, military or civilian.

The researchers aim to build an electronic system that understands human language, takes and remembers instructions, learns from its experiences and copes with unexpected situations.

It won’t make coffee, but it also won’t grumble or demand a raise.

The automated aide-de-camp is supposed to be able to sort e-mail, schedule meetings, make plane reservations, collect information for reports and carry out other humdrum, time-consuming chores for busy human managers.

Although the duties seem routine, creating a software program that can handle them is one of the most difficult challenges in computer science. Artificial-intelligence experts have struggled for years to make machines perform functions that are simple for people but stump electronic devices. Today’s computing speed and power, however, make things that were impossible five or 10 years ago more practical, researchers said. “Progress has been slow but steady,” Eric Mathews, the associate director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis, said in an e-mail message.

The office assistant program is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon unit that pioneered such once blue-sky developments as the Internet, stealth aircraft and microelectronic machines.

DARPA Director Anthony Tether told the House Science Committee last month that his agency is moving into the field of “cognitive computing,” meaning computer systems that “perceive, reason and learn,” not just crunch numbers and manipulate data. The Pentagon project is called PAL, an acronym for “personalized assistant that learns.”

“Cognitive systems that learn to adapt to their users could dramatically improve a wide range of military operations,” said Ronald Brachman, director of DARPA’s Information Processing Technology Office. “They could learn and even improve on their own.”

The PAL program aims to “make military decision-making more efficient and more effective at all levels, from the individual soldier to the high-level commander, and to reduce risk for humans,” Brachman said. The system is supposed to “perform well in specific scenarios that are exactly like those that a human executive assistant would face.”

For work on PAL, DARPA has granted $22 million to SRI International, a research organization in Menlo Park, Calif., and $7 million to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. More than 20 universities and research labs are contributing to the effort, launched in 2003.