Personal Assistants for the Web: An MIT Perspective Dep. Of Computer Science 95323-016 김광수

Introduction The problem of information complexity Solution : Intelligent information agent Active assistance in finding and organizing information Like a human assistant The word “agent” : assistant

Intelligent Information Agent Information in the Web Highly unstructured Natural language , pictures Partial understanding => effective assistance to the user

Information Retrieval - static databases, concentrated , organized in records - a conversational paradigm( query, hits ) But, on the Web,Information Intelligent Agent - hypertext, distributed, unstructured, non-textual information - active, proactively trying to gather information even without the user’s explicit command

Letizia information reconnaissance agent It watches your Web browsing to try to learn what topics you are interested in. It searches Semantic neighborhood of the current page to discover other pages you might be interested in

Letizia A co-operative venture between the user and Letizia While you search “deep” (DFS) , Letizia searches “wide” (BFS)

Remembrance Agent information reconnaissance agent RA maintains the user’s personal information ( ex. the user’s e-mail, the set of files in the user’s home directory ) It shows messages that are relevant to the currently viewed text

An engineer reads email about a project RA might remind her of project schedules, status reports, and other resources related to the project

Let’s Browse Allow a group to collaboratively browse together Ex) business meeting , WebTV for family By intersecting individual profiles of the users A Letizia-like scan of a breadth-first neighborhood surrounding each user’s home page, or their organization’s home page

Firefly Collaborative filtering agent Every person says what items they like and dislike New items are recommended to a user based on the opinions of people with similar taste

Yenta Yenta introduces the users who share similar tastes to each other (match-making) Yenta indexes e-mail & personal files like RA Distributed, peer-to-peer communication, no central site

Butterfly A recommendation system for chat channels The user converses with the Butterfly “chatterbot” Butterfly periodically scans the thousands of available chat channels, sampling each only for a short time

ExpertFinder EF assists with the problem of finding another user who is knowledgeable to answer a question EF monitors a user’s activity within desktop applications Ex) for Java programming

Tête-à-Tête Matchmaking between buyers and sellers in Electronic Commerce The paradigm of integrative negotiation - multiple dimensions rather than just price

The Footprints Sytem “history-rich” visualizing history-of-use in a complex information space Nodes are documents (from any web site), links are traversals

Information Agents Can be Controversial It can make mistakes But - It can be used with conventional direct-manipulation software - feedback between the user and the agent Intelligent information agents can help the users !