A writer’s collaborative assistant

In traditional human-computer interfaces, a human mas-ter directs a computer system as a servant, telling it not only what to do, but also how to do it. Collaborative inter-faces attempt to realign the roles, making the participants collaborators in solving the person's problem. This paper describes Writer's Aid, a system that deploys AI planning techniques to enable it to serve as an author's collaborative assistant. Writer's Aid diers from previous collaborative interfaces in both the kinds of actions the system partner takes and the underlying technology it uses to do so. While an author writes a document, Writer's Aid helps in identify-ing and inserting citation keys and by autonomously nding and caching potentially relevant papers and their associated bibliographic information from various on-line sources. This autonomy, enabled by the use of a planning system at the core of Writer's Aid, distinguishes this system from other collaborative interfaces. The collaborative design and its division of labor result in more ecient operation: faster and easier writing on the user's part and more eective in-formation gathering on the part of the system. Subjects in our laboratory user study found the system eective and the interface intuitive and easy to use. 1