Creating the Right Environment for Agents

Publications        Pictures of the Future Fall 2001

Development of intelligent software agents is moving too slowly. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the issue is very complex, because researchers must unite approaches from various disciplines (artificial intelligence, distributed systems, linguistics and the social sciences). At the same time, agents require an appropriate "field of activity," with associated software platforms. These platforms control exactly how much access agents have to the computers they visit. After all, an outside agent should not be able to see or access everything, let alone be able to delete data. "There are at least 15 interesting technological platforms," says Siemens researcher Michael Berger. This diversity is precisely what poses such difficulties. Global standards must be created that allow agents to operate in a uniform infrastructure.

The "Avatar Conference", a European Union research project, began in early 2001. Participating research institutes and companies want to create a virtual conference environment in which companies and their business partners can conduct multimedia meetings, conferences and presentations via the Internet. Avatar technologies and multi-user platforms will make it possible for participants to meet in a virtual room, have a discussion, exchange knowledge and information, and make decisions—without having to leave their offices. A content management system will supply the virtual conference environment with data accessible to everyone and thus permit simultaneous work on a document, for example. Plans also call for a dictionary and a translation service to be provided in order to improve communication among business partners. Currently, an initial prototype is being created along with design sketches for three-dimensional conference rooms. Project partners include the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO in Stuttgart (project coordination), several companies from Europe, and a representative from the U.S. Additional information is available at www.ebi.iao.fraunhofer.de/english.

Part of the problem is a lack of common communications protocols and directories—such as the yellow pages—from which agents can draw information in order to make decisions. Recognizing this, research institutes and industry established FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) in 1996. The organization currently consists of approximately 65 members. Another important body is the OMG (Object Management Group), which developed the interoperability standard known as Corba and which also proposes norms specifically for the management of mobile agents and their functions. Members of these organizations share experiences, discuss the next stages of development to be addressed and attempt to establish standards similar to MPEG. The issue here is what the components for the architecture of an agent system should be and how they should interact with each other. Once the architecture has been established, it is simulated in tests to determine whether the proposed system functions and how it should be employed. Appropriate adjustments are then derived from these reference applications. Over and above that, special emphasis is placed on two ideas:

Since 2000, the European Union has been running a project known as "Crumpet" (creation of user-friendly mobile services personalized for tourism). The program is a UMTS-based portable tourist guidebook and route planner for individual travelers. Participants include the European Media Laboratory (EML) in Heidelberg, Germany, the GMD research center in St. Augustin, Germany, Queen Mary & Westfield College, U.K., the University of Helsinki and several telecommunications companies from the U.K., Finland and Portugal. The system will provide user terminals with wireless, location-specific, multimedia information. To access the data, users have to commission a virtual agent, which then gets in touch with "colleagues" to locate the desired information (www.eml.villa-bosch.de).

Most companies are currently limiting themselves to simply observing developments. This is because the market for software agents is still very new and not very well organized. However, those companies that have adequate resources are conducting very extensive development programs in order to stake a place for themselves in the worldwide agents market. In addition to Siemens, these companies include Oracle, AT&T, IBM, Apple Computer and Logica. There are also a number of companies that deal with special tools not only for accessing agents and knowledge, but also for communicating across networks and interfaces. These include Edify, Lotus, Sun, Microsoft, Quasar, MicroStrategy and Hewlett-Packard.