1. Personal Assistants for the Web: An MIT Perspective
Dep. Of Computer Science
김광수

2. 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

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

4. 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

5. 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

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

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

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

11. 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

14. 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

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

18. 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

20. 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

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

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

26. 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 !