Personal Assistants for the Web:

An MIT Perspective

Dep. Of Computer Science95323-016 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

User browsing

User browsing

Letizia browsing

Letizia browsing

Letizia A co-operative venture between the

user and Letizia While you search “deep” (DFS)

, Letizia searches “wide” (BFS)

User Browsing

Letizia Search Candidates

Letizia Recommendations

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 !