Intelligent Agents

What are
they ?

Possible
uses

Why use
them ?

>The
future

Further
resources

The future of intelligent agents

As a means of showing what the differences between the mentioned agents are, the (well-known) metaphor of the information highway is used. On this highway an intelligent agent may be a backseat driver who makes suggestions at every turn (Tour Guides), a taxi driver who takes you to your destination (Indexing Agents or FAQ-Finders), or even a concierge whose knowledge and skills make it unnecessary for a person to approach the superhighway at all.

A draw-back of tour guides and indexing agents is that their actions and suggestions are based on a relatively weak model of what the user wants and what information is available at a suggested location. An attempt to change this is the Internet Softbot (developed by the University of Washington). The aim is to create an agent that attempts to determine what the user wants and understands the contents of information services.

The agents that were described in the metaphor, access unstructured or semistructured information (such as text files). The Internet Softbot tackles a different component of information on the Internet: structured information services such as stock quote servers or library databases.
Because the information is structured, the Softbot need not rely on natural language or information retrieval techniques to "understand" the information provided by a service.. Instead, the Softbot relies on a model of the service for the precise semantics associated with information provided by the service. As a result, the Softbot can answer focused queries with relatively high reliability; the chances of finding relevant information are high and the amount of non-relevant information ('noise') is (relatively) low.

The Internet Softbot is a prototype a high-level assistant, analogous to a hotel concierge. In contrast to systems for assisted browsing or information retrieval, the Softbot can accept high-level user goals and dynamically synthesise the appropriate sequence of Internet commands to satisfy those goals. The Softbot executes the sequence, gathering information to aid future decisions, recovering from errors, and retrying commands if necessary.

The Softbot eliminates a person's need to "drive" the information superhighway at all; the person (user) delegates that job to the Softbot. More general: the Softbot allows a user to specify what to accomplish, while it handles the decisions of how and where to accomplish it. This makes the Internet Softbot a good example of a goal-oriented agent.

The goal-orientedness of the Softbot is useful only if users find specifying requests to it easier than carrying out activities themselves. The agent has three properties which should make goal specification convenient for users:

1.	An expressive goal language: the Softbot accepts goals containing complex combinations of conjunction, disjunction, negation, and nested universal and existential quantification. This allows specification of tasks such as "Get all of researcher Joe's technical reports that are not already stored locally";
2.	A convenient syntax and interface for formulating requests: despite the expressive power of mathematical logic, many users are unable (or unwilling) to type long, complex, quantifier-laden sentences (something many Information Retrieval systems require). For this reason, the Softbot supplies a forms-based graphical user interface and automatically translates forms into the logical goal language. Natural language input, an alternative approach pursued by many researchers, is not yet incorporated in the Softbot;
3.	Mixed-initiative refinement dialogue: even with a well-engineered interface, it is difficult to specify orders precisely. Human assistants solve this problem by asking questions to their client in order to be able to iteratively refine a given goal. The current Softbot has only limited support for in-between questions, but a new interface is being designed that will allow the Softbot to pose questions (while it continues to work) and allow the user to add information and constraints.

The Softbot possesses many, but not all of the desired characteristics as described in 'What is an Intelligent Agent'. It is autonomous, goal-oriented, flexible and self-starting (i.e. it possesses "reactivity"). At this moment work is being done to extend the Softbot's collaborative, communicative, adaptive and personality-characteristics.
The Softbot is not mobile, but it does not really need to be that. What's more, it would entail all kinds of complicated security and privacy issues (with regard to its user).

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