Agents for Mobility with a Java-enabled Orbiter

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1 Agents for Mobility with a Java-enabled Orbiter André Vellino Computing Research Lab, Nortel Technology Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council Aug 2nd 96

2 What are Agents? Software systems designed to act on the user s behalf to achieve a goal. Example Goals Reduce information overload ( , WWW) Seek out personalized information (clipping service) Perform transactions on your behalf (stock-market buy/sell) Control and manage personal information such as telephone calls, appointment sheduling(i..e. personal assistant) Teach the user how to perform a task (internet search assistant ); Monitor events and notifying users (news notification service) Help different users collaborate (expertise referral service) Anything that helps improve the user s ability to communicate! Agents and Information Filtering Andre Vellino:Aug 1/96:Version 1.0

3 Taxonomy of Agents Autonomous Agents An agent is autonomous if it has the ability to act independently of other agents Distributed Multi-Agents Agents which exist in relation to others to form a society of communicating, co-operating agents Intelligent Agents An agent is intelligent if it is autonomous and it is able to execute plans to achieve it s goal and adapt its behaviour to a changing environment Reactive / Proactive Agents An agent is reactive if it only responds to stimuli (e.g. time-of-day call forwarding) and proactive if it autonomously initiates actions Interface Agents Interface agents are personal assistants that enhance the user s capability Proprietary Agents and Information Filtering Andre Vellino:Aug 1/96:Version 1.0

4 Next Generation Mobile Phones Principal Characteristics of Orbiter High-quality digital sound PDA LCD Display and Pen/Keyboard Input HyperLink HTML-based GUI Model DSP and RISC Processors (tens of MIPS) 4-8 M of RAM Java Support from Real-Time OS Agents and Information Filtering Andre Vellino:Aug 1/96:Version 1.0

5 Reasons for Mobile Agents Premisses mobile phones/computers are disconnected from the network (most of the time) connections are low bandwidth and high latency connection reliability is poor Therefore the more computing you do locally, the less you depend on network resources. Therefore empower agents to act on your behalf within the network. Proprietary Agents and Information Filtering Andre Vellino:Aug 1/96:Version 1.0

6 Characteristics of Mobile Agents Advantages peer-peer communications (rather than client/server); applets distribution to end-users is easy; less bandwidth is consumed; remote interaction resilient to intermitant network failure; enables itinerant (site-to-site) computing applications. Areas of Concern no standards established yet for agent and multi-agent architecture and multi-platform communications; cross-organization billing issues not resolved; security and complexity of software management; Agents and Information Filtering Andre Vellino:Aug 1/96:Version 1.0

7 Applications for Mobile Users Network-based Information Retrieval and Filtering Agents Audio on demand (e.g. CBC News on WWW) White Pages / Yellow Pages Search-and-Dial Service Time-of-Day Call-Screening and Call Management Organizer Utility Billing Applets and Electronic Banking Mobile Agents for multi-party Scheduling Intelligent Caching for improving WWW performance Real-Estate location service Note: not all these applications need be implemented with mobile agents. Proprietary Agents and Information Filtering Andre Vellino:Aug 1/96:Version 1.0

8 Information Filtering Technologies Agents to reduce information overload by automatically filtering out irrelevant data NetSumm (BT)--Document Summarizer (sentence extractor) Context (Oracle)--Document Precis Sun s Conceptual Indexing Visual Recall (Xsoft)--Document Visualization (summarization+visualization) Automatic Key-word Extraction (NRC) AccessTV (Televitesse)--Keyword filter for streaming video SandPoint Hoover (by Information Access Company) real-time news filtering First! for the Web (by Verity, Inc.) form-centered news service Info-Scan (for and News) stand-alone PC/Mac App. WiseWire (Empirical Media Corp. x-cmu) U-Zine Xerox s Lexical Technology (XSoft): provides more accurate searching for search engines e.g. "swim" would also find "swam" and "swum." Agents and Information Filtering Andre Vellino:Aug 1/96:Version 1.0

9 Conclusions Mobile Agents for Orbiter have Potential for providing: asynchronous, connectionless user-interfaces to network resources information filtering and notification services within the network telephony management and audio-on-demand access to existing WWW and videotex resources Agent architecture for Orbiter applications should be contained by client-server model; Agent implementation should be consistent with emerging standards; Proprietary Agents and Information Filtering Andre Vellino:Aug 1/96:Version 1.0

10 References [1] Robert Gray, David Kotz, Saurab Nog, Daniela Rus, George Cybenko Mobile agents for mobile computing Dept. of C. S. Technical Report PCS- TR96-285, Dartmouth College, [2] James White Mobile Agents in Software Agents (Jeffrey Bradshaw, ed.) MIT Press [3] Liljeberg Heikki Helin, Markku Kojo, Kimmo Raatikainen Enhanced Services for World-Wide Web in Mobile WAN Environment Report C [4] Richard Fikes, Robert Engelmore, Adam Farquhar, Wanda Pratt Network-Based Information Brokers Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium, [5] Kautz H., Milewski A. and Selman B. (1995). Agent Amplified Communication Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium, 1995 [6] David Chess, Benjamin Grossof, Colin Harrison, David Levine, Colin Parris Itinerant Agents for Mobile Computing IEEE Personal Communications Magazine, October [7] David Chess, Colin Harrison, Aaron Kershenbaum Mobile Agents: Are They a Good Idea? IBM Research Report RC 19887, Agents and Information Filtering Andre Vellino:Aug 1/96:Version 1.0