 behavioral studies of human managers. The project will initially focus on four tasks: e-mail, scheduling, webmas- tering, and space planning. "With each task, we'll run experiments to see how well people do by themselves and make comparisons," says Daniel P. Siewiorek, director of Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Insti- tute. "We will also look at people, plus a human assistant, and compare that to the software agent." Initial software development goals include the creation of a shared knowledge base, a module that decides when to interrupt the user with questions, and a module that extracts information, such as meeting requests, from e-mail messages. "The key scientific challenge in this work is to endow RADAR with enough flexibility and general knowledge to handle tasks of this nature," says Scott Fahlman, one of project's principal researchers. "Like any good assistant, RADAR must understand its human master's activities and preferences and how they change over time. RADAR must respond to specific instructions, such as 'Notify me as soon as the new budget numbers arrive by e-mail, without the need for reprogramming." Yet Fahlman notes that the system also must be able to learn by interacting with its master to see how he or she reacts to various events. "It must know when to interrupt its master with a question and when to defer," he says. The project has received an initial $7 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is interested in the technology's potential to streamline military communications and workloads. 5.4.2 Next-Generation Agent A new intelligent agent that works through users' mobile phones to organize business and social schedules has been developed by scientists at a university in the United Kingdom. Artificial intelligence software allows the agent to determine users' prefer- ences and to use the Web to plan business and social events, such as travel itin- eraries and visits to restaurants and theatres. "I see the artificial agent as a bu