Information Diary for 2/11
Mike Foster


11:30 - Read Boston Globe, looking at comics, sports section, front page, and
	entertainment.

1-4pm - In meeting

3:30 - Parents called, left message on answering machine

3:45 - Brother called, left message on answering machine

4:30 - called parents

5:00 - Logged in to check email, find the weather, and read netnews.

6:00 - Watched some of the evening news before eating dinner.

8:00 - In meeting

10:00 - Read part of "Distributed Object Management" for an article relevent
	to my Thesis

11:00 - Called brother

For most of these, a personal assistant would not do much good. All use of the
phone was very straightforward, and checking email and the weather on-line 
was simply a matter of typing a few simple commands. The meetings were not 
really information sources, and no personal assistant was really necessary
for them. However, for the others, I was able to think of ways in which a
personal assistant could be useful.

1) Book - "Distributed Object Management"

I needed to use the book to read a paper that provided some background 
information about the Thor database system for my Thesis. My supervisor was 
one of the co-authors of the paper, so she directed me to it. After finding 
the book, getting the information was simply a matter of reading the article. 

I only needed small parts of the article, so an intelligent personal 
information assistant could be helpful in pointing me to the proper place in 
the paper to look. This could be done by storing an abstract of each section
of the paper, so that I could reference the abstract in deciding which parts
of the paper were relevant. It was a fairly long paper, and this added
information would make the research process a little easier. Also, the
assistant could be used to store references to other papers dealing with the
Thor database. I believe that this information can already be obtained through
the computers at the LCS library, but it would be nice if a personal assistant
would automatically give the information to me when I asked for information on
the paper.

2) Computer - Netnews

I was logged on at Athena, looking at some of my newsgroups. I had not
checked them for a few days, so there was a large backlog of articles. I had
to sift through a lot of junk to find articles that I wanted to read.
Eventually, I found what I wanted, but it seemed like something that could
take much less time.

The main thing a personal assistant could aid in is sifting through the
articles. The newsgroups are all about one topic, but within the group, there
are several different subtopics and discussions running at the same time. It
would be nice if an assistant could organize all the articles into categories.
Something along the lines of the WWW search engines at Yahoo and other places.
Within a newsgroup, rec.sports.tennis for example, I could ask it to find all
the articles giving results, ignoring the analysis, followups, etc... This
way, I could either go through all the articles, or I could just look at all
the articles in a certain subtopic. The personal assistant would be able to
narrow down the list of articles to look at. 

3) Television - Evening News

Every night, I try to watch the 6pm news to keep up with what is going on in 
the world. There are 3 different channels that offer this, and sometimes they 
are all covering the same story, and sometimes they are covering something 
different. Sometimes the station has its own special exclusive report on 
some topic. Apart from constantly flipping between the stations, there is no 
way to keep up with else is being reported. It would be nice if a personal 
assistant could organize the reports somehow, i.e. giving the order of 
reports for the evening on each station. Therefore, before the news started, 
I could try to plan what I would like to see. Or, it could be a guide about 
what is currently playing on each channel. Therefore, as I watched, I could 
switch to the station with the most interesting report. Granted, this is not 
something of earth-shattering importance, but I would appreciate it, since I 
do flip between channels often.

4) Newspaper - Boston Globe

In the morning before leaving for classes, I like to look through the Boston 
Globe to get sports scores, read the comics, and look through the front 
section. Reading the comics is very straight forward, and there is not much a
personal assistant could do to aid that. The front page tells you where the 
comics are, and you look on that page. All the scores are in the sports
section. For the most part, this is a fairly simple process. Look at the NBA
part, find the scores, look at the tennis part, find the scores. College
sports are a little more difficult. The Globe only lists in depth scores from
the Top 25 and local schools. For teams not included in this, you have to look
through a long list of scores to find out if the team played, and if so what
the score was. A personal assistant could help be giving the score for the
team you ask it for, or telling you that they didn't play. Another use could
be for the front page. Sometimes, my time is limited, and I only have a short
time to look through the front section. A personal assistant could have a list
of articles in a prioritized order for me. The order would be determined by my
own personal preferences and importance I give to certain types of news.
Therefore, I could look at the articles I found most important first.