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It Takes a Virtual Village: Towards an Automated Interactive Agency Elizabeth Sklar Department of Computer Science Columbia University New York, NY 10027 USA  HYPERLINK mailto:sklar@ sklar@ Abstract Internet agents are frequently designed to be personal assistants, helping a single user accomplish a specific task. The work presented here explores the idea of agents as independent entities existing in a virtual vil- lage, geared towards education. Three classes of agents are presented, designed to meet the varied and chang- ing needs of a population of human learners. Introduction. With the advent of the Internet, humans have found new and exciting ways to interact, with each other and with a seemingly infinite network of information and shopping sources. The explosive popularity of elec- tronic mail, instant messaging, on-line chat, virtual shopping outlets and auction houses is proof that, like the telephone and the department store, the World Wide Web is here to stay. Humans are not alone in populating the Internet; software agents also inhabit cyberspace. Internet agents are generally built to be personal assistants, helping a single user accomplish a specific task. Over the last decade, Internet agents have gained prominence as browsing assistants (Lieberman 1995), matchmakers (Foner 1997; Kuokka Harada 1997), recommenders (Balabanovi′c 1998) and filterers of email and news group messages (Goldberg et al. 1992; Lashkari, Me- tral, Maes 1994; Lang 1995). Some agents use var- ious machine learning techniques to adapt their be- havior to the needs of individual users (Qureshi 1996; Balabanovi′c 1998). The existence of interactive Internet agents allows us to establish the notion of a virtual village, wherein hu- mans in diverse places and time zones can meet, shop and trade just as in a traditional village, but the need for spatially or even temporally co-locating participants and goods is now eliminated. This notion is not only