The document discusses personal assistants and how they can help decentralize and coordinate complex processes. It describes how a personal assistant could help coordinate a patient's care among different medical specialists by cloning case files, synchronizing changes, and transforming data between their differing representations to facilitate communication. The personal assistant is envisioned to one day interact with other assistants, clone and synchronize projects, and enable large scale processes to emerge from the interactions between decentralized parties.

1. © Copyright 2013 Keith D Swenson
Keith D Swenson
March 2014
Letting Go of Control
what it means to leverage personal assistants to
decentralize a process

2.  An Agent is Software that:
 Does something for you
 Works autonomously
 Directed by goals
Agents are simply part of
the current technology
infrastructure!

3.  An Agent is Software that:
 Does something for you
 Works autonomously
 Directed by goals
 Apple Knowledge Navigator (1987)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
hb4AzF6wEoc
Agents are simply part of
the current technology
infrastructure!

4.  An Agent is Software that:
 Does something for you
 Works autonomously
 Directed by goals
 Instead lets call it a Personal Assistant
 Apple Knowledge Navigator (1987)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
hb4AzF6wEoc
Agents are simply part of
the current technology
infrastructure!

5. Scenario
Patient
Alex
Primary Doctor
Betty

6. Scenario
Patient
Alex
Primary Doctor
Betty
Back Specialist
Charles

7. Scenario
Patient
Alex
Primary Doctor
Betty
Back Specialist
Charles
Physical Therapist
Dennis

8. Confer Tests
Do
Do
Do
Primary Doctor
Meet Research Recommend
Back Specialist
Assess Treat Conclude
Physical Therapist

9. Personal Assistant

10. Personal Assistant

11. Personal Assistant

13. Complexity & Emergence
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26. Simple Rules to Emergent Behavior
1. Bunch
2. Swoop
3. Swirl
1. Avoid hitting each
other,
2. Stay near the flock,
3. Match velocity of
neighbors.

27. Deriving Rules is Difficult or Impossible
1. Avoid hitting each
other,
2. Stay near the flock,
3. Match velocity of
neighbors.
1. Bunch
2. Swoop
3. Swirl
?

28. Cognoscenti
Open Source Project
https://code.google.com/p/cognoscenti/
Test bed & reference implementation for:
Project exchange protocol
Federated case management
Personal assistant

29. Demo
Alex Betty’s
Practice
Charles’
Practice
Dennis’
Space
Hosted on
Cloud Server
Hosted on
This Laptop
1. Personal Assistant helps coordinate communications
2. This is safer than email

59. Demo
Alex Betty’s
Practice
Charles’
Practice
Dennis’
Space
Hosted on
Cloud Server
Hosted on
This Laptop
1. Personal Assistant helps coordinate communications
2. This is safer than email

60. Confer Tests
Do
Do
Do
Primary Doctor
Primary
Doctor
Back
Specialist

61. Confer Tests
Do
Do
Do
Primary Doctor
Personal
Assistant
What does it take to
make this software
act like a person?
Primary
Doctor
Back
Specialist
Personal
Assistant

62. Case Cloning
Confer Tests
Do
Do
Do
Primary Doctor
Meet Research Recommend
Back Specialist
Personal
Assistant

63. Cloning: copy documents & data
Confer Tests
Do
Do
Do
Primary Doctor
Meet Research Recommend
Back Specialist
PA has to bring
copies of DB
and documents
Personal
Assistant

64. Confer Tests
Do
Do
Do
Primary Doctor
Meet Research Recommend
Back Specialist
PA synchronizes
back when changed
within lower process
Personal
Assistant

65. Fan-out Problem – Interworking All
Many
Primary
Doctors
Many
Back
Specialists
Many
Physical
Therapists

66. Fan-out Problem – Interworking All
Many
Primary
Doctors
Many
Back
Specialists
Many
Physical
Therapists

67. Differing Representations of Patient
Primary
Doctor
Back
Specialist
Physical
Therapist
Patient Info
Patient Info
Patient Info

68. Agent Must
Primary
Doctor
Back
Specialist
Physical
Therapist
Patient Info
Patient Info
Patient Info
Transform
schema
between
levels
semantic mapping
semantic mapping
semantic mapping
possibly
using
mapping
to
standard
ontology
Personal
Assistant
Personal
Assistant

69. Personal Assistant Can
 Receive and screen notifications – filter the spam for
relevant notifications.
 Task Introduction – find offered tasks, gather additional
information
 Task Acceptance – sending a notice back to the sender.
 Clone Project –automatically retrieve all the accessible.
 Determine the Template –and start the process if necessary.
 Synchronize – in both directions.
 Transform Data – access the taxonomies that give the
semantic meaning of the data, and use that to transform the
data to a suitable form while synchronizing

70. Summary
In the future we might see
personal assistants interacting
with other personal assistants,
cloning & synchronizing projects,
and the large scale processes
emerging from that interaction.