Abstract

A central thesis in our research has been the claim that a number of routine information processing needs in organizations can be efficiently automated. As such, we are interested in designing and implementing software systems that automate and share information processing tasks of associated human users. The benefit of such software is two-fold: they allow users to concentrate on more productive tasks, and they improve the quality of information processing by preventing errors that might be introduced by human users due to the routine and tedious nature of the job in question. In particular, we have studied the problem of efficiently automating the process of scheduling meetings between employees in an organization. Our approach to meeting scheduling, in contrast to most of the currently available software for centralized calendar management and meeting scheduling, is a distributed one, where each employee in the organization is provided with an automated (comput...

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