Position Paper for Intelligent Environments AAAI 1998 Spring Symposium

Intelligent environments can have at least two novel roles in assisting users with tasks. First, they can help users with the difficult task of sorting through and filtering high band-width data streams. People are well adapted to sorting out relevant information in the everyday environments in which we evolved, but when presented with multiple or large digi-tal data streams, we can easily be overwhelmed or lose the relevant information in the flood. Intelligent environments, by knowing the context in which a person is situated and/or the user’s focus of attention, can help to filter irrelevant data and present to the user only what the user desires. The second way in which intelligent environments can assist users is by enabling the user to perform tasks that he or she could not have performed without the augmentation of the environment. This characteristic is not necessaril