Mr. Jones -- Towards a Proactive Smart Room Orchestrator

In this paper, we report work in progress on the development of Mr. Jones -- a proactive orchestrator and decision support agent for a collaborative decision making setting embodied by a smart room. The duties of such an agent may range across interactive problem solving with other agents in the environment, developing automated summaries of meetings, visualization of the internal decision making process, proactive data and resource management, and so on. Specifically, we highlight the importance of integrating higher level symbolic reasoning and intent recognition in the design of such an agent, and outline pathways towards the realization of these capabilities. We will demonstrate some of these functionalities here in the context of automated orchestration of a meeting in the CEL -- the Cognitive Environments Laboratory at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center.