Agent-related groups in industry and business
-
Intelligent
Agents Project at IBM T.J. Watson Research: -- Embeddable
Intelligent Agents for Networked Applications, including Internet.
"Our mission is to develop intelligent agent technology that is highly
reusable and easy to integrate with a broad spectrum of networked
applications. Towards this end, we prototype applications in tandem
with developing reusable componentry. We also contribute to
company-wide efforts in strategy and in common architecture, e.g., for
inter-agent knowledge-level communication and inter-operability. For
more information about company-wide efforts, see the main IBM
intelligent agents page, as well as
our white papers and publications." 1/7/97
-
Daniel Weld and Oren Etzioni of the University of Washington have
helped to found NETbot as a
venture-backed, development-stage Internet software company. NETbot
will develope advanced agent technologies focused on "data
disaggregation problems" on the Internet. NETbot hopes to satisfy the
"expanding need for software tools which will find, collect, and
collate data from a wide variety of sources for the non-technical
user." Core technology themes are providing meta-level services on
top of existing applications lightweight design; and
practicality. NETbot applications inhabit a space "above" other
applications such as text indices in that they aggregate, collate, and
display data generated by other lower-level applications. NETbot
applications are lightweight: they employ powerful artificial
intelligence techniques with code optimized for small footprint and
quick operation. Initial demonstrations of their technologyt include
the
MetaCrawler search tool and the Ahoy home page finder.
12/5/96
- Extempo Systems
(Sunyvale CA)designs and builds synthetic actors for incorporation
into interactive products for entertainment, education, and
business. Extempo was founded by Dr. Barbara Hayes-Roth in 1995 and
has funding from the NIST ATP program and from DARPA. Extempo's
software provides the "brains" for characters that can be integrated
with a variety of graphics and animation systems to create life-like,
intelligent, and surprising improvisational behavior. 7/24/96
- Company:
AgentSoft is a new company founded by Jeffrey Rosenschein, Gilad
Zlotkin and Eithan Ephrati that will focus on the development and
marketing of intelligent agent software products for the Internet and
for enterprise Intranet. 3/28/96
- Group:
Andersen Consulting's has a new web page which describes their ongoing
intelligent agents
research. The page gives short descriptions of their projects, as
well as one-page "thought-piece" articles on our projects for a
mass-market audience. Current projects include:
- InfoFinder: A system that learns a user's information interests
from sample liked and disliked documents, and proactively presents new
information matching those interests from a variety of on-line
sources.
- ContactFinder: A system that lives on a bulletin board
discussion, remembering who the key contacts are in different areas
and answering questions with referrals.
- BargainFinder: A system for real-time comparison price shopping
on the Internet.
- NewsFinder: A system that finds news and other information for
personalized ubiquitous delivery based on a user's interests,
schedule, and work context.
2/26/96
- IBM's Intelligent
Agent page describes their business strategy for agent technology,
offers several white papers, and lists a number of related events and
resources. There is a nice white paper
on intelligent agents. 12/7/95
- Firefly is a spin off of the Media Lab group that
did HOMR. They describe themselves as "a venture-backed business
commercializing a revolutionary new set of algorithms - originally
developed by company founders at the MIT Media Laboratory - that
leverage the human experiences of subscribers to help users navigate
large information spaces. These technologies automate the
word-of-mouth process while creating truly digital communities."
Their first system, Firefly, is based on HOMR
and is described as "your own personal software agent capable of
communicating with other users and recommending music that it knows
you'll enjoy."12/7/95
- The Microsoft Research User Interfaces
group is part of their and is exploring some
agent-related technologies:
- Social user interfaces based on life-like computer
characters which can interact and build a rapport with the user.
-
Spoken conversation with a computer agents. See Persona: Conversational
Interfaces
- Reactive 3D-animation including complex animated behavior,
real-time specification and synchronization of various time-based
streams.
This group is part of MSR's overall research effort on advanced
interactivity and intelligence .10/22/95
- Edify Corporation is a small Santa
Clara software company which markets Electronic Workforce, "an
interactive service platform used to create and manage applications
incorporating World Wide Web, voice response, fax and electronic mail
capabilities. Based on advanced software agent technology, the
Electronic Workforce provides a flexible, robust environment to
quickly and cost-effectively bridge the gap between customers and
traditional information systems. The Electronic Workforce is deployed
at more than 500 sites worldwide as a strategic solution to increase
service and productivity within customer service, human resource and
other organizations in financial services, manufacturing, technology,
transportation, education and utility sectors." 10/20/95
- Charles River
Analytics "develops and offers learning agent software that makes
personal computing "easy to do" instead of just "easy to use." A
pioneer in hybrid neural and knowledge-based systems, Charles River
Analytics is leading a technological revolution that will radically
change the way we use computers, with software that assists the user."
9/7/95
- The Loral Mediated
Architectures Research Group.
-
Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center
- IBM Massively
Distributed Systems group at T. J. Watson Research Center.
- General Magic server. See
also Magic Cap, and
Telescript and Magic Cap. 7/21/95
- Enterprise Integration Technology
(EIT).
- Teleos Reactive Agents Project
- Xerox Dynamics
of Multiagent Systems, Dynamics of
Computation Area