IRIA: The information retrieval intelligent assistant

The modern work environment demands the ability to search and manage large amounts of information from a wide variety of applications. The Information Research Intelligent Assistant (IRIA) addresses this problem by acting as an autonomous assistant to a user, unobtrusively building a map of accessible relevant information and using it to enable users to find information quickly. To do so, IRIA applies experience-based agency, a cognitive science approach to managing information access in large databases, to information search. In empirical tests, IRIA demonstrated the ability to monitor both user and workgroup web searches to preactively find and recommend relevant information.