Agents & Agency What do we mean by agents? Are agents just a metaphor? Science Fiction? Physical or Virtual? Are agents just a metaphor? By defining agents are we defining intelligence? Replacing people with agents Replacing systems with agents Agents force us to discover & address tacit knowledge (experience) in knowledge work

Agents are here We’ve been using agents and agent like technology for a long time.

That’s agents, not robots

What kinds of agents are there? Intelligent Agents Show “intelligence” in interacting with the environment Act based on previous facts or rules Make leaps of intuition Do things for you Autonomous Agents Interact with the environment Stimulus & response, not always rules Can perform a wider range of activities over time Do things we do not or can not do

Agents & Angels Agents as help to manage information Agents also are creating lots of new data Possible uses Managing our social life Replace conventional organizations Helping us find things (web crawlers) Performing repetitive information tasks A human face on information tasks? Jeeves, Watson, Sherlock, Eliza, the Wizard Pushes our interaction into something more “natural”

Agents or Angels? Who manages the agents? When is a decision made? Upon arrival of the information After information is compared Blink vs. DeepThought Is it possible to make our information use behavior transparent? Is it flattering? What if we find too much information? Enabling more knowledge work or just more work? Speed vs. Accuracy

Ranks of Agents Information Brokering Product Brokering Networks & the Web Search & Overload Management Product Brokering Shopping (Buying?) Recommendations / Collaborative Filtering Merchant Brokering Personalization, Customer “service” Logical, naïve decisions & gaming Negotiating Multi-part decisions Conversation?

Autonomy & Agents Delegating “Do this every time” “More like this” “Buy when AUS to LAX = $300” How subtle is this kind of (tacit) work / decision making? Agents interacting with each other Negotiations between systems APIs, crawlers, auction bots, reminders Semantic Web Cancelbots (“Nots”) Easier to say “no” than “yes”

Autonomous Interface Agents Both showing & doing things for users A combination of classical Artificial Intelligence & Human Computer Interaction Interact with the interface & the user Any program acting as an assistant with learning, inference, adaptibility, independence, creativity, etc. Lieberman p 1 More examples Contextual help, tutoring systems Filtering, Highlighting systems Autonomous agents operate in parallel with the user

How agents should work Observe interface actions & act Run “in the background” to Manipulate information (& the interface) for you Why this personalized view of agent interactions? Understanding one person is difficult enough Group interactions require making relationships explicit

Letizia - a surfing agent Watching what you surf Predicting where you might go Searching for you as links Another type of memory about what you do

Design principles for agents Suggest rather than act Take advantage of information the user gives the agent “for free” Take advantage of the user’s think time Problems with agents The user’s attention may be time shared Provide context for input Use the interface to show history & state Deliberation vs. Action Sufficient data for a decision Waiting, watching & doing Cognitive style differences Agents may not fit user’s mental models Distraction (over time?)

Social Filtering with Agents SOaP - a system of agents to mediate between people, groups & the Web Privacy issues among people & businesses Smart Groupware? Collaborative Filtering + Agents? Coordinating knowledge work? Matching user interests Agents specialize in the system Supports groupwork automatically

Social Information Filtering Can a system replace “word of mouth”? Quality of information, not frequency Volume of information, broader perspectives Is the best information digital? Digital great for facts Not to great for intuitions or wisdom How do you code in organization culture? A focus on user (interest) profiles Helping you understand what you’re already doing Large numbers help reveal quality Are we already used to recommendations?

Reducing Information Overload Most apt use of agents in the last 10 years Might be creating more information for us to manage Increases explicit knowledge,but tacit? We need agents to help do things in real time, without our intervention The Web & agents are a good match Understanding behavior & training agents Watching, examples, (others) profiles Not filtering as much as ordering Might be most interesting to see others’ agents, not your own

How might people use agents? Do we need more complexity to create simplicity? How long will it take before we don’t worry about agent imperfection? Ensure control Meet privacy considerations Safeguards for actions Meet (& communicate) expectations Show actions, but hide complexity Build confidence slowly Social acceptance of agents (organizational expectation)

Blogs & Social Dimensions Are blogs taking the place of newsgroups? RSS Readers Topic discovery methods Blog rolls Search engines Links Issues of Awareness Posting technologies s. Usenet