Chapter 19 Intelligent Agents and Creativity.ppt

Chapter 19: Intelligent Agents and Creativity 19.1 Opening Vignettes: Examples of Intelligent Agents Vignette 1: Empowering Employees with Software Agents Nike and Signet Bank installed special software agents Employees access the human resources databases and Select and Change Benefits Make Charity Contributions Other Human Resources Activities Electronic Workforce (from Edify Corp.) Delegates time-consuming and repetitive tasks of human resource (HR) employees to any employee Enables employees to enter, update and delete data; and interpret information Cuts error rate Enabling software is an intelligent agent Vignette 2: Software Agents Cooperating to Provide the Best Travel Plans 19.2 Intelligent Agents (IA): An Overview Intelligent Agent (IA): Computer program that helps a user with routine computer tasks New Technology Other Names Software agents Wizards Knowbots Softbots Agent: Employing someone to act on your behalf Several Definitions of Intelligent Agent “Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out some set of operations on behalf of a user or another program, with some degree of independence or autonomy and in so doing, employ some knowledge or representation of the user’s goals or desires.” (“The IBM Agent” [:81/WhitePaper/ptc2.htm]) An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through effectors (Russell and Norvig [1995], p. 33) Autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit some complex dynamic environment, sense and act autonomously in this environment and by doing so realize a set of goals or tasks for which they are designed (Maes [1995], p. 108) More Definitions of Intelligent Agent A persistent software entity dedicated to a specific purpose. “Persistent” distinguishes agents from subroutines; agents have their own ideas about how to accomplish tasks, e.g., their own agenda. “Special purpose” distinguishes them from entire multifunction ap