Why Surf Alone? Exploring the Web with
Reconnaissance Agents
Henry Lieberman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Thursday, Nov. 12th, 10 - 11 AM
The next major development in the evolution of the Internet will be introduction of intelligent agents, programs that run independently of the user's activities, and are capable of learning from interacting with the user, and providing help or suggestions. Letizia is an agent that assists Web browsing by providing a "channel surfing" window that continuously displays recommendations. It learns the user's preferences by recording the user's choices in the browser and searches the "neighborhood" of the current page for other pages of interest. It treats Web browsing as a cooperative search activity between the human user and the computer agent, providing a middle ground between narrowly targeted retrieval such as provided by search engines, and completely unconstrained manual browsing.
Information about Letizia is available at:
http://www.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/Letizia/Letizia-Intro.html
As time permits, I will also describe some other projects in the Software Agents group on other agent-related projects.
Henry
Lieberman has been a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1987. His
interests are in the intersection of artificial intelligence and the human interface. He
is a member of the Software Agents group, which is concerned with making intelligent
software that assists users in interactive interfaces. His current projects involve
intelligent agents for the Web that learn by "watching what you do". From
1972-87, he was a researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He started
with Seymour Papert in the group that originally developed the educational language Logo,
and wrote the first bitmap and color graphics systems for Logo. He also worked with Carl
Hewitt on actors, an early object-oriented, parallel language, and developed the notion of
prototypes and the first real-time garbage collection algorithm. He holds a
doctoral-equivalent degree from the University of Paris VI and was a Visiting Professor
there.
Home page: http://www.media.mit.edu/~lieber/