Feed Gift for the Gab
""INTELLIGENT AGENTS," that venerable CompSci concept, has long been something of an oxymoron. We've had a decade's worth of promises that an army of self-contained electronic processes would soon be scouring the network on our behalf, ferreting out information and finding the lowest price for everything from CDs to airline tickets. The reality, of course, is that agents have never yet found any practical application. Dr. Lee Giles and Dr. Kam-Chuen Jim, researchers at NEC, may have found the secret to transforming experimental agents into practical tools: talking helps."

redux [08.27.00]
strategy + business Pattie Maes and Her Agents Provocateur
"For a leading researcher at one of the United States' top universities, Pattie Maes is surprisingly uninterested in the technological underpinnings of her own work. That's not to say that her basic research in artificial intelligence (AI) isn't impressive. The 38-year-old associate professor at the Massachusetts engineered major breakthroughs in software agents, programs that are changing the face of Internet shopping and are on the verge of turning retailing on its head. But to Dr. Maes (pronounced "Mahs"), it's not the technology but its effect that is important. She is the prototype of the New Economy scholar/entrepreneur: a scientist in academia committed to seeing her ideas become commercial successes."

""I realized that computers could augment people," Dr. Maes says. "That's what all of my research is really about. Our lives are so busy and there are so many choices to make, so many opportunities to keep track of, and so much accessible information; we end up feeling overwhelmed. If we could make computers smarter and better serve people, we'd be on to something. I think of this as intelligence augmentation - IA rather than AI."

The New York Times In Online Auctions of the Future, It'll Be Bot vs. Bot vs. Bot
[requires 'free' registration]
"THEY are called shopbots, buybots, pricebots or just plain bots -- the "bot" is short for robot. The name is playful, but the reality is all business because shopbots are meant to roam the Web all by themselves one day, efficiently buying and selling goods and services for people and companies."

"Right now, bots that simply go out and fetch price lists from the Web do not make intelligent decisions about matching a buyer's needs with a combination of offerings.

"That will change," Mr. Bryan said.

"And businesses need to be prepared.""

First Monday Intelligent Agents, Markets and Competition: Consumers' Interests and Functionality of Destination Sites
"Intelligent agents are first and foremost tools which can be applied in numerous and different ways. However, Intelligent agents, in the true sense of attributed functions such as autonomy and pro-activity, do not yet exist. There are agent-like applications like Web crawlers and search engines which sometimes include collaborative filtering; in spite of these advances a software entity that combines all of these functions into an intelligent agent has yet to be developed. Still, it is only a matter of time when intelligent agents will play a decisive role in the electronic marketplace and therefore in competition. This paper explores the boundaries of what might happen in markets when intelligent agents are introduced and used by market participants. It discusses existing commercial agent-like applications and treats models on how different functions of agents could affect different market stages. Two types of markets - travel and bookselling - are examined, focusing on consumers' interests and the functionality of destination sites."

Nature: Web Matters Is There an Intelligent Agent in Your Future?
"The vision of such intelligent agents is quite compelling and many people now believe they will be necessary if we are ever to tame the increasing complexities caused by the accelerating and virtually uncontrolled growth of the World Wide Web."

"The most basic need in interacting with an agent is a language in which to communicate. While it is possible to 'fake' these semantics (with the program reacting appropriately to keywords, for example), an agent that is truly useful must have a lot of knowledge about the problem being solved. If the travel agent doesn't know about geography (Where is the Caribbean?), transportation (What airlines go there?), lodging (Is that a good hotel?), economics (Can I afford to stay there?), etc. then we cannot easily communicate our needs. If the internet agent doesn't understand the area in which it must work (molecular biology, particle physics, etc.), it is not able to find appropriate resources any better than current keyword based approaches."

British Telecommunications Laboratories A Perspective on Software Agents Research
[note: this is an archived html version residing on the umbc agentweb server. the original zipped, postscript document can be found at BT Laboratories' Intelligent Systems Research (ISR) Group's publications page ]
"This paper sets out, ambitiously, to present a brief reappraisal of software agents research. Evidently, software agent technology has promised much. However some five years after the word ?agent? came into vogue in the popular computing press, it is perhaps time the efforts in this fledgling area are thoroughly evaluated with a view to refocusing future efforts. We do not pretend to have done this in this paper - but we hope we have sown the first seeds towards a thorough first 5-year report of the software agents area. The paper contains some strong views not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community."