ComputerWorld's FutureWatch profiles Carnegie Mellon's Radar project (Reflective Agent with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning) which aims to build a computer-based administrative assistance that can intelligently guess what tasks need to be performed to help you in your daily routine.

For instance, suppose a manager receives an e-mail from a colleague requesting some slides. Fahlman and his team are trying to optimize the Radar system to understand the request at a basic level, draft a response and notify the manager with a message like, "Here's my proposed answer; do you accept this?" and then await the manager's response.

Radar isn't intended to act just as an e-mail filtering system, Fahlman says. As a text-in, text-out system, there's "a huge opportunity" for one Radar system to "talk" with another Radar system, schedule meetings and draw information from or post it to a company's Web site, he explains.

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