Co-Habited Mixed-Reality Information Spaces
The COMRIS project aims to develop, demonstrate and experimentally
evaluate a scalable approach to integrating the Inhabited Information
Spaces schema with a concept of software agents. The COMRIS vision
of co-habited mixed-reality information spaces emphasizes the
co-habitation of software and human agents in a pair of closely coupled
spaces, a virtual and a real one. However, this project does not pursue
the perceptual integration of real and virtual space into an augmented
reality. Instead the coupling aims at focusing the large potential for
useful social interactions in each of the spaces, so that they become
more manageable, goal-directed and effective. The COMRIS project
uses the conference center as the thematic space and concrete context
of work. The conference center is a structure of places for registration,
presentation, refreshment, and so on. At a conference, like the Annual
Esprit meeting in Brussels, people gather to show their results, see other
interesting things, find interesting people, meet EU officials in person, or
engage in any kind of discussion. The possibilities of interaction at such
an event are enormous, it is very information-intensive, and the great
diversity of topics and purposes that are being addressed make it
difficult to get everything done. This clearly motivates our aim of
focusing a large potential for interaction such that effectiveness of
participation to such or another large event is enhanced.
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.
People
- We have a photo of the "integration
team" from the latest COMRIS-Workshop online. You can see the
weareable quite well to on the photo.
Funding
Contact
Open Topics for Master Theses
Interessted students can view a list with open topics for master
theses dealing with
agents. This list is in german (sorry).
Software
Partner
Publications
| 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] |
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