Initially an NSF-, DARPA- and Department of Interior-funded project, Oregon State's TaskTracer has apparently evolved to some state of commercialization. In 2006, according to an OSU press release, "Smart Desktop was started at OSU by Jon Herlocker and Tom Dietterich to commercialize the results of the TaskTracer research project – technology that uses machine intelligence to automatically classify, sort and organize information for people, by observing and learning from their interactions with their personal computers."
What was TaskTracer? The researcher sum it up this way:
What was TaskTracer? The researcher sum it up this way:
At the center of the TaskTracer project is the concept that almost all workers organize their work into discrete and describable units, such as projects, tasks or to-do items. Our approach will combine user input, creative user interfaces, and machine learning to assign each observed action (opening a file, saving a file, sending an email, cutting and pasting information, etc.) to such a task for which it is likely being performed.
Hop over to SmartDesktop.com and you'll see the beginnings of a commercial version. The commercial project may be dead (there are no forum postings), but the assets are owned by Decho Corporation, and you can try out a preview version. Bravery may be a prerequisite, as the product occasionally needs to muck greatly with Outlook.
TaskTracer made use of Protege for ontology modeling -- it's not disclosed whether SmartDesktop does the same.
Some pretty desktops are now commercially available -- see Otaku's. But prettier is not smarter.
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Some pretty desktops are now commercially available -- see Otaku's. But prettier is not smarter.
