Planning and visualization for a smart meeting room assistant

In this paper, we report on the planning and visualization capabilities of Mr.Jones-a proactive orchestrator and decision-support agent for a collaborative decision making setting embodied by a smart room. The duties of such an agent may range across interactive problem solving with other agents in the environment, developing automated summaries of meetings, visualization of the internal decision-making process, proactive data and resource management, and so on. Specifically, we focus on how the visualization of the planning and plan recognition processes forms a key component of the smart assistant, and establishes transparency in the decision-making process. We also highlight how these processes contribute to the proactive nature of the agent. We demonstrate some of these functionalities in a successful deployment of the system in the CEL-the Cognitive Environments Laboratory at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center (Yorktown, USA), and report on emerging deployments of the system that have turned into success stories.