Intelligent Agents Conference Notes

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Intelligent AgentsConference Notes

• ISE Workshop at NASA
• 16/17-SEP-1998

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Topics

• 1. Information Retrieval
• Why Surf Alone? (Lieberman, MIT)
• Knowledge Representation (Hendler, UMD)
• 2. Agent Interaction
• Conversational Agents (Finin, UMD)
• Conscious Agents (Franklin, U.Memphis)

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• 3. Organization
• Coordinating Intelligent Agents (Decker, UDE)
• Agent Based Computing and the Open Agent
  Architecture (Cheyer Moran, SRI)
• 4. Practical Engineering Applications
• Role of Intelligent Agents in Advanced
  Information Systems (Kerschberg, GMU)
• Multiagent Systems, WWW, and Networked Scientific
  Computing (Joshi, UMD)

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• 5. Design Using Agents
• Improving Design w/ Agents (Brown, Worcester
  Tech)
• Decentralized Decision Making in Concurrent
  Engineering (Birmingham, UMI)
• Standards Activity in Agent Based Learning and
  Visual Consultation for Manufacturing (Aparicia,
  IBM)
• 6. Multiagent Programming Future
• Multiagent Oriented Programming (Huhns, USC)
• Future Directions (general discussion)

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Topic 1.1Why Surf Alone? Reconnaisance
AgentsHenry Lieberman, MIT
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Two Modes of Info Retrieval

• Browsing
• exploring, can follow tangents, vague ideas
• fun but easy to get lost
• chunky- stick w/ clump of topic, then move on
  to something else (e.g., paris, music)
• Searching
• precisely targetted retrieval
• computers can search pre-indexed docs quickly
• what if you don't want to search for exactly
  something for which you know a keyword?

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Why not something in between?

• People have Interests
• sometimes expressed as keywords, sometimes not
• can recognize information in which they have an
  interest sometimes better than a computer
• IR should involve cooperation between an
  intelligent agent and the user
• the user is better at deciding what has value to
  him
• the computer is better at searching prexisting
  indexes

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• Evaluation Function
• provides a mapping between the users idea of
  merit and computers idea of merit
• an agent can learn an evaluation function by
  observing the users browsing behavior

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Depth vs. Breadth First Searching

• Depth First
• traditional search engines used by Netscape, etc.
• presents options and the user picks one path to
  follow
• not optimal since the engine returns one batch of
  results per query there are no more chances
• Breadth First
• searching in parallel
• an agent can perform this type of search
• every time the user goes from one page to
  another, the agent can refocus its breadth first
  search

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Analyzable Qualities ofUsers Browsing Behavior

• Every click is an expression of interest
• content keywords of documents browsed
• sequence of browsing operations
• Other expressions of interest
• Agents would help in
• maintaining areas of interest
• finding areas of dual interests (e.g. french jazz
  concert)

• email
• bookmarks, links to page

• dwell time
• downloads

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Lets Browse

• Multiple users browsing together, agent
• takes into account interests of passive
  participants
• can represent interests for each user (from home
  pages)
• dynamically performs freq analysis to to discover
  areas of common (intersecting) interest
• hey, I didn't know you played tennis -
  icebreaker
• interesting result - had to keep more terms per
  user than in single user case (had to dip lower
  into minor personal interests in order to find
  common interests)

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LETIZIA

• What is it?
• Liebermans example of a reconnaisance agent
• an advance scout for web browsing
• a channel surfing interface
• What does it do?
• provides temporal sampling of different info
  sources
• observes users browsing behavior
• infers users interests from its observations

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LETIZIA, notes...

• works w/ interactive interface (unmodified
  netscape), doesn't replace
• doesn't take any extra effort to communicate to
  agent
• anticipates user's interests
• explores links from home page to see if anything
  interesting
• agent looks through links, determines which are
  most interesting
• agent also looks at results from search engine
• also uses netscape history to keep track