Intelligent Agent

By: Kian Yousefi

Intelligent Agent

• In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is which observes and acts upon an environment (i.e. it is an agent) and directs its activity towards achieving goals (i.e. it is rational). Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals.

Intelligent Agent

• An intelligent agent is software that assists you, or acts on your behalf, in performing repetitive computer related tasks– i.e. clippie (the annoying Microsoft paperclip)– i.e. Amazon’s recommendation system

• The four main types of intelligent agents are:– buyer agents or shopping bots, – user or personal agents, – monitoring and surveillance agents, – data mining agents

Buyer Agent or Shopping Bots (Information Agents)

• Is an intelligent agent on a web site that helps the customer, find products and services they want.

• Shopping bots work very efficiently when it comes to searching for commodity products.

Types of Buyer agents

• There are three types of buyer agents for online shopping environments:– Profile filtering – Psychographic filtering– Adaptive filtering

• These agents use different methods to find recommendations for the customers.

Types of Buyer agents – Profile filtering requires that you choose terms

or enter keywords• Provides a more personal picture of you and your

preferences

– Psychographic filtering anticipates your preferences on the basis of the answers you give to questionnaire

– Adaptive filtering asks you to rate products or situations and also monitors your actions over time to find out what you like and dislike

Buyer agents or shopping bots (example)

• CNET's shopping bot focuses on computers and other types of consumer electronics, including wireless devices. One of the earliest shopping bots, Price Watch has allowed shoppers to search for computers and computer parts since 1995.

Buyer agents or shopping bots (example)

• Amazon’s agent uses collaborative filtering, which consists of matching each customer with a group of users who have similar tastes and presents them with similar products.

Buyer agents or shopping bots (example)

• BookFinder.com searches Amazon, Antiqbook, Barnes and Noble, Bibliofind, and other online book retailers. A combined database of roughly 15 million books to find the cheapest book prices for shoppers.

Monitoring and Surveillance Agents (Predictive Agents)

• Are intelligent agents that observe and report on equipment

• These agents look for a change in conditions– Often used to monitor manufacturing

equipment, complex computer networks, inventory, planning, etc.

– May also be used to monitor competition, Internet sites, discussion groups, mailing lists, products, and auction sites

Monitoring agents (Example)

• NASA's Laboratory has an agent that monitors inventory, planning, and schedule equipment ordering. This assures that everything is ordered on time and keeps cost low.

Monitoring agents (Example)

• Allstate Insurance has a network with thousands of computers. The company uses a network monitoring agent that watches its huge networks 24 hours a day. Every five seconds, the agent measures 1200 data points and can predict a system crash 45 minutes before it happens.

Data Mining Agents

• These intelligent agents operate in a data warehouse and work to discover information

• A common type of data mining is classification – which finds patterns of information

and categorizes items into those classes

Data Mining Agents

• Data mining agents – Go through a lot of information for

relevant information– Detect a major shift in the trend or a key

indicator– Detect the presence of new information

and alert you

User or Personal Agents

• Intelligent agents that take action on your behalf. For example,– Check your email, sort it and alert you of

important emails– Play computer games as your opponent or

patrol game areas for you– Assemble customized news reports– Find information on subjects– Fill out web forms– Scan web pages and highlight important text

Features of Personal Agents

• Adaptability: Personal agents must be able to learn the user’s behavior, the users habits and preferences, and be able to adapt to them,

• Information Sharing: often user’s personal agents will find it beneficial to share information with each other rather than simply work alone.

• Agent Collaboration: Personal agents may need to collaborate with each other to perform tasks for their users.

• Information Privacy: Users must trust their personal agents. These agents have access to the users personal information since in a lot of cases they are performing actions on behalf of the user.

• Haag & Cummings & McCubbrey & Pinsonneault & Donovan (2006). Management Information Systems Third Canadian Ed. McGraw-Hill Ryerson

• http://eil.utoronto.ca/profiles/rune/node6.html

• http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/intelligent-agent

• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/

Time’s Up!

• About your speaker:– Name: Kian Yousefi– Prepared: Michael Jones CCT355– Quick bio: 3rd year digital enterprise

management student.