Agents and areas of application

Transcription

1 Agents and areas of application Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione Università di Milano-Bicocca giuseppe.vizzari@disco.unimib.it andrea.bonomi@disco.unimib.it 23 Giugno 2007

2 Software Engineering Social sciences Distributed Systems Artificial Intelligence AGENT CSCW Artificial societies Information Retrieval HCI

3 Human-Computer Interaction Agents as entities that observe human behaviour in a virtual environment (a user interface) and adapt it to better fit his/her needs and preferences Commonly called interface agents

4 Interface Agents Patti Maes, Agents that Reduce Work and Information Overload Different approaches: observe and imitate user, communicating with him/her if necessary, and interacting with applications suggest actions to the user and learn according to direct/ indirect feedback learn from explicit examples

5 Interface Agents: Letizia Letizia is a user interface agent that assists a user browsing the Web The agent tracks user behavior and attempts to anticipate items of interest by doing concurrent, autonomous exploration of links from the user's current position The agent automates a browsing strategy consisting of a best-first search augmented by heuristics inferring user interest from browsing behavior Sample heuristics Time spent on a page Links clicked on a page Bookmarking a page Pages described by keywords Similarity to pages of interest can imply interest

6 Interface Agents: Office Assistant The Office Assistant was a feature included in Microsoft Office 97 and subsequent versions until Office Typing an address followed by "Dear" would prompt Clippit to pop-up and say "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help? Office XP - disabled by default Office not install by default Office Microsoft has removed the Office Assistant feature in favour of a new help system

7 Interface Agents: MMASS Web Agents Web site A web site presents an intrinsic graph like spatial structure composed of pages connected by hyperlinks. User Situated MAS Page MMASS allows the explicit representation of agents environment through a set of interconnected layers whose structure is an undirected graph of nodes. Place Agent 2005-

8 MMASS Web Agents Web Browser Interface Agent Web Server Suggestion Servlet Agent Server Users' behaviours User Agents Architecture Layers

9 MMASS Web Agents Web Browser (user XYZ) GET events.html Web Server events.html Agent Server Interface Agent events.html data tracker invocation user XYZ, on page events.html events.html Tracket Servlet XYZ agent: XYZ page: events.html move Active sessions list

10 MMASS Web Agents Online user Footprints Context-aware buddy list Suggestions box

11 Interface Agents: Lexicle Smart Fridge The Smart Fridge includes a touch-screen user interface. The touch-screen enables users to see and interact directly with the fridge's contents display, recipe suggestions, shopping list and the embodied conversational agent.

12 Embodied Conversational Agents Nakanishi, Nakazawa, Ishida, Takanashi and Isbister Can Software Agents Influence Human Relations? - Balance Theory in Agent-mediated Communities Embodied conversational agents support human-human communication and relationship, building in virtual environments 2003

13 Second Life Second Life is an Internet-based virtual world. There are two main methods of text-based communication: local chat, and global "instant messaging". Chatting is used for public localized conversations between two or more avatars, and can be "heard" within 25 m. e-learning on Second Life Voice communication is currently in beta testing.

14 Supporting cooperation in a pervasive context Supporting cooperation and collaborative work in a hospital Integration with the hospital information system to supply users with timely and accurate information Supporting interaction among users distant in space but also distant in time (e.g. messages to people in different turns) Need to consider the context of the interaction Seamless integration with high tech devices Agents as a suitable design abstraction for the software architecture

15 BTicino My Home

16 BTicino My Home

17 Information Retrieval Information Agents as searchers of information supporting (human) users Very often there is an architecture of collaborative agents characterized by different roles (e.g. librarian and seekers ) Other approaches investigate agent mobility, its advantages and issues In general this context requires a very good ontological representation of the context of classification of information and retrieval

18 Bibster Bibster is a Peer-to-Peer system for exchanging bibliographic data among researchers. It exploits ontologies in data storage, query formulation, query routing and answer presentation Bibliographic entries are automatically aligned to two common ontologies: Interface is not web-based Semantic Web Research Community Ontology It describes different generic aspects of bibliographic data ACM Topic Hierarchy It describes specific categories of Computer Science domain

19 NavEditOW Digital library: collections of bibliographical information + effective mechanism for the retrieval The main requirement is to give the community itself the possibility of autonomously managing the contents by means of simple editing tools Bibliographic data will be entered manually by the students, while archaeology professors and researchers will supervise the work! In most cases, archaeologists have just low-level technical competence Published data Archaeology students e-library Supervisors

20 NavEditOW The e-library is based on NavEditOW, a system for the visualization, navigation, querying, updating and maintenance of ontologies through the web. In order to support navigation, editing and query of ontologies for users with little or no knowledge of formal languages in which they are represented, a number of features should be implemented. Ontology visualization is essential for the user to explore the available information and it also helps non-expert users to refine their search requirements, should they start with no specific requirement in mind.

21 Visualization Our approach is to use a tree navigation and to visualize the details of the selected item only The navigation tree is a hierarchy of classes, and individuals connected by subclassof, instanceof and other domain-specific properties Thing navigation tree Culture class Place individual Structure subclassof subclassof Geographic Place instanceof Italy North partof Center individual details property Site South

22 The presentation layer is a Web-based user-interface. Architecture The framework was developed according to a three-tier architectural approach SPARQL Remote client The aim of the persistence layer is to store the topics ontology, the publications descriptions and bibliographic data. OWL DL RDF