Cognitive assistance at work

Abstract

Today's businesses, government and society work and services are centered around interactions, collaborations and knowledge work. The pace, amount and veracity of data generated and processed by a worker has accelerated significantly to the level that challenged human cognitive load and productivity. On the other hand, big data has provided an unprecedented opportunity for AI to tackle one of the main challenges hindering the AI progress: building models of world in a scalable, adaptive and dynamic manner. In this paper, we describe the technology requirements of building cognitive assistance technologies that assists human workers, and present a cognitive work assistant framework that aims at offering intelligence assistance to workers to improve their productivity and agility. We then describe the design and development of a set of cognitive services offered by the framework, based on advanced NLP and machine learning methods. The cognitive services help workers in processing and linking information and identifying and tracking work items over interactions in communication channels such as email, social conversations and media, chats and messaging and calendar applications. These cognitive services are designed to be adaptive, online and personalized so that over time adapt to changing environment and knowledge, and the models become personalized through learning preferences and working language and style of the subject worker.