An Expert Digital Companion forWorking Environments

Research in proactive agents capable of anticipating users' needs has been conducted in different application areas, from agents aiming to help users accomplish their next task while using a text editor to digital assistants that provide support to medical professionals in hospitals. Considering these works and following the rapid development in machine learning, the growing adoption of the IoT, the prevalence of pervasive computing, and the various innovative user interfaces that are becoming mainstream, we propose the creation of expert digital companions. Expert digital companions are agents that know the specifics of an environment and the available physical equipment in a space as well as software components reachable in that environment. On their side, personal digital companions know the preferences of a specific user. The separation of concerns between expert and personal companions enables them to evolve independently. Thus, expert and personal digital companions collaborate to provide customized assistance to a user given her environment. In this paper, we present two expert digital companions for employees working in an office and a shopfloor environment that takes advantages of: the decoupling that the W3C WoT Thing Description provides to interact with and control devices and other tools; a Knowledge Graph to provide richer descriptions of elements in the environment; computer vision to perceive the physical world; and Mixed Reality as the medium to deliver assistance to workers.