In the mixed-reality conference center real and virtual conference activities are going on in parallel. Each participant wears its personal assistant, an electronic badge and ear-phone device, wirelessly hooked into an Intranet. This personal assistant - the COMRIS parrot - realizes a bidirectional link between the real and virtual spaces. It observes what is going on around its host (whereabouts, activities, other people around), and it informs its host about potentially useful encounters, ongoing demonstrations that may be worthwhile attending, and so on. This information is gathered by several personal representatives, the software agents that participate on behalf of a real person in the virtual conference. Each of these has the purpose to represent, defend and further a particular interest or objective of the real participant, including those interests that this participant is not explicitly attending to. The project brings together ideas from different backgrounds (software agents, virtuality, networking, robotics, machine learning, social science) into a coherent concept and technical approach. Hardware challenges (e.g. the parrot on wireless Intranet) are complemented with software challenges. COMRIS pursues a radical information push model, in which information is actively imposed upon the user in its concrete minute-to-minute context of activities. The virtual space and its inhabitants is explicitly designed to facilitate this. In particular its notion of 'space' is defined as potential for interaction; not physical interaction as in real space, but interest-relating interaction. Techniques of 'interest based navigation' bring together those virtual agents whose interests are likely to fit into a productive social process. Their interactions accumulate an information context, mined from a variety of structured and unstructured sources, and related to the different interests involved. At all times, techniques of 'competition for attention' focus the interactions and in particular the stream of information towards the user.
Haustein/2001c | Stefan Haustein (2001). Utilising an Ontology Based Repository to Connect Web Miners and Application Agents. In Proceedings of the ECML/PKDD Workshop on Semantic Web Mining. . [.ps] [.pdf] |
Haustein/Luedecke/2000a | Stefan Haustein and Sascha Lüdecke (2000). Towards Information Agent Interoperability. In Mathias Klusch and Larry Kerschberg, editor(s), Cooperative Information Agents IV -- The Future of Information Agents in Cyberspace in series LNCS, pages 208 -- 219. Springer. [.pdf] |
Haustein/etal/2000a | Stefan Haustein and Sascha Lüdecke and Christian Schwering (2000). The Knowledge Agency. In Carles Sierra and Maria Gini and Jeffrey S. Rosenschein, editor(s), Proceedings of the Forth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pages 205 -- 206. ACM Press, New York. [.ps] [.pdf] |
Morik/Haustein/2000a | Katharina Morik and Stefan Haustein (2000). The Challenge of Discovering Meta--Data. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI press. [.ps.gz] [.ps] |
Haustein/99a | Stefan Haustein (1999). Information Environments for Software Agents. In Wolfram Burgard and Thomas Christaller and Armin B. Cremers, editor(s), KI-99: Advances in Artificial Intelligence in series LNAI, pages 295 -- 298. Springer Verlag. [.ps] [.pdf] |
Haustein/Luedecke/99a | Haustein, Stefan and Lüdecke, Sascha (1999). Kombination von Agenten- und Blackboard-Technologien für betriebswirtschaftliche Anwendungen. In Proceedings des Workshops "Agententechnologie" auf der KI 99: Agententechnologie -- Multiagentensysteme in der Informationslogistik und wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Perspektiven der Agenten-Konzeptionalisierung, pages 9 -- 15. . [.ps] [.pdf] |
Haustein/Luedecke/99b | Haustein, Stefan and Lüdecke, Sascha (1999). Combination of Agent- and Blackboard-Technologies for Buisiness Applications. In Kirn, Stefan and Petsch, Mathias, editor(s), Workshop ``Intelligente Softwareagenten und betriebswirtschaftliche Anwendungsszenarien'' number 16 in series Arbeitsbericht, pages 231--237. . [.pdf] |