Personal assistant to improve CSCW

This paper describes a Personal Assistant (PA) for knowledge management. Groupware and collaborative software do not explore domain knowledge efficiently. This information is important to organize the information and to help the user in specialized work. Here we describe a PA using domain knowledge to help a user in a collaborative environment. The PA records user's tasks, uses domain knowledge to organize them, and offers help and propositions regarding the user's work. The PAs communicate with others PAs to exchange users' information. Therefore, one can reuse experiences of others users. The interaction with the user occurs through window dialogs and by means of natural language. PAs are used in an educational environment to aid remote groups of students to do collaborative mechanical engineering design. We make a brief review about PAs and then introduce our approach.