TITLE: Trusting Your Assistant


AUTHOR: Robert J. Hall
        AT&T Research
        hall@research.att.com


ABSTRACT:
The assistant interface metaphor has the potential to shield the human
user from low-level, task-specific details, while allowing the
automation of the many idiosyncratic, mundane tasks falling between
the capabilities of commercial software packages.  However, a user
will not willingly put resources (money, privacy, information) at risk
unless the assistant can be trusted to carry out the task in accord
with the user's goals and priorities.  This risk is significant,
because assistant behaviors, being idiosyncratic and highly
customized, will not be as well supported or documented as is
commercial software.  This paper describes a solution to this problem,
allowing the assistant to safely execute partially trusted behaviors
and to interactively increase the user's trust in the behavior so that
more of the steps can be carried out autonomously.  The approach is
independent of how the behavior was acquired and is based on using
incremental formal validation to populate a trust library for the
behavior.