@inproceedings{09b1908aa1d14fb88dc44fa7b6e97421,
title = "Calendar.help: Designing a workflow-based scheduling agent with humans in the loop",
abstract = "Although information workers may complain about meetings, they are an essential part of their work life. Consequently, busy people spend a significant amount of time scheduling meetings. We present Calendar.help, a system that provides fast, efficient scheduling through structured workflows. Users interact with the system via email, delegating their scheduling needs to the system as if it were a human personal assistant. Common scheduling scenarios are broken down using well-defined workflows and completed as a series of microtasks that are automated when possible and executed by a human otherwise. Unusual scenarios fall back to a trained human assistant who executes them as unstructured macrotasks. We describe the iterative approach we used to develop Calendar.help, and share the lessons learned from scheduling thousands of meetings during a year of real-world deployments. Our findings provide insight into how complex information tasks can be broken down into repeatable components that can be executed efficiently to improve productivity.",
keywords = "Assistant, Conversational agent, Crowdsourcing, Macrotask, Microtask, Scheduling",
author = "Justin Cranshaw and Emad Elwany and Todd Newman and Rafal Kocielnik and Bowen Yu and Sandeep Soni and Jaime Teevan and Andr{\'e}s Monroy-Hern{\'a}ndez",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017 ACM.; 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2017 ; Conference date: 06-05-2017 Through 11-05-2017",
year = "2017",
month = may,
day = "2",
doi = "10.1145/3025453.3025780",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
pages = "2382--2393",
booktitle = "CHI 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems",
}