Proactivity in an intentionally helpful personal assistive agent

The increased scope and complexity of tasks that people per-form as part of their routine work has led to growing inter-est in the development of intelligent personal assistive agents that can aid a human in managing and performing tasks. One desired capability for such agents is that they be able to act proactively to anticipate user needs, opportunities and prob-lems, and then act on their own initiative to address them. This position paper outlines some initial thoughts on desired forms of proactive behavior, and identifies technical chal-lenges in developing systems that embody such behaviors