Alfred: End User Empowerment in Human Centered Pervasive Computing

Alfred is an electronic butler for Intelligent Environments. Alfred allows an end user to "program" the system by telling it the name of a new goal, demonstrating one or more plans for achieving that goal, and finally telling the system the conditions under which it would prefer one plan to another. Similarly, the user can name events that arise in the environment and tell the system what goals should be posted when those events arise. Each of these steps can be done by simple verbal commands or other natural forms of interaction. End users, in effect, record "macros" which, are executed adaptively and reactively.