AN INTELLIGENT AGENT
is a software entity that senses its environment and
then carries out some operations on behalf of a user,
with a certain degree of autonomy, and in doing so,
employs knowledge or representation of the user’s
goals or desires.
The Agent will take your profile and preferences and
then go out and work on your behalf.
Characteristics of an intelligent agent
Autonomy: can act without you telling them what to do
Adaptivity: can change itself and what it does based upon
your changing characteristics.
Sociability: can communicate and interact with other
agents that it encounters.
Types of Intelligent Agents
• Information Agents: search for information and bring it back to you (from the
Internet or a database)
– Buyer agents, shopping bots, search and filtering agents, Googlebots that scour the
Internet locating and indexing sites that ultimately appear in search results when you do a
Google search.
– The SuperFetch feature (search feature) found in Vista
• Monitoring and Surveillance Agents: constantly observe and report back on
what they see.
– Applications software agents monitor the activities of software users and offer
suggestions for improvement.
– Wizards and the Microsoft Office Assistant (Clip It)
• User Agents: act as a personal assistant by taking action on your behalf.
Examples include sorting and prioritizing email, filling out forms on the Web
automatically for you, and automatically storing your information.
• Data Mining agents operate in a data warehouse by sifting through the data, trying
to discover trends, relationships and patterns through the use of multidimensional
statistical analysis.
• A relational database stores information in a series of two
dimensional tables.
• Data warehouses are multidimensional, containing layers of
rows and columns. Each dimension is an attribute of
information.
Data-mining agents perform
multidimensional analysis in data
warehouses
• Cube – common term for the representation of multidimensional information (layers, rows, columns)
• Info in an Excel spreadsheet and a relational
database (Access) appears in the form of a two
dimensional table of rows and columns.
• By adding a Page Field to a Pivot Table, you
can add another dimension of information: 3-D
(rows and columns and layers).
– Creating a 3-dimensional Pivot Table in Excel is a
means of conceptually building a data warehouse.
Page fields represent the depth layer
• Pivot Tables can help you see relationships in
the data
Data-mining agents perform
multidimensional analysis in data
warehouses
• Cube – common term for the representation of multidimensional information (layers, rows, columns)
Based On
Starting
Information
AI System
Problem Type
Expert
Systems
Diagnostic or
prescriptive
Strategies of
experts
Expert’s
know-how
Neural
Networks
Identification,
classification,
prediction
The human
brain
Acceptable
patterns
Genetic
Algorithms
Biological
Optimal solution evolution
Set of
possible
solutions
Intelligent
Agents
Specific and
repetitive tasks
Your
preferences
One or more AI
techniques
• This type of system is used to find the very best, or
optimal answer? It is based on evolutionary
concepts
– The Genetic Algorithm
• What type of system is based on pattern
recognition? Due to its pattern recognition abilities,
it is capable of learning. It can detect forgeries and
new viruses it has never seen.
– The Neural Network
• This type of system can reason through a process. It
is used for diagnostic and prescriptive types of tasks.
– The Expert System
• This is a highly interactive system where you have to know what
you are doing to effectively use it. It is used to solve nonprogrammed decisions (unstructured problems) where there are
several possible correct answers. Spreadsheet what-if analysis is
an example of what this system can do.
– Decision Support System
• Data mining agents conduct multi-dimensional analysis of the data
found in a ______________.
– Data warehouse
• Buyer agents, shop bots and googlebots are examples of what type
of agent?
– Information agents
• The Microsoft Office Assistant wizard (Clip It) is an example of
what type of agent?
– Monitoring and surveillance agent