Presented by: D. Scott McCrickard
The theme of this week's agents seminar will be user interfaces for software agents. Without stirring up too much of a fuss, I'll define "software agents" as tools that autonomously collect information on behalf of a user. For example, an agent might monitor the traffic conditions and inform a user of slow-downs, or search for the cheapest air fare for a user's holiday trip, or monitor baseball scores when the user is busy with other tasks.
A problem arises in communicating this collected information back to the user. Unlike many (non-agent) programs, the user is not simply pressing a button and receiving a response. Agents work continuously and may generate results at any time, results that somehow must be communicated to the user in a timely yet appropriate manner. We will discuss the many criteria that dictate how the information should be communicated -- the nature of the change, the frequency with which information changes, the current activities of the user, etc. We will outline solutions that address the criteria -- emailed summaries, automatically generated Web pages, animated displays, and more.
As part of my research, I've been developing a number of interactors that enable hands-off, information-dense communication of information to the user. I will be demoing a number of applications that have been written using these interactors. The brave among you may want to try them out beforehand (and hopefully use them afterwards).
All of the below agents run on Suns running SunOS 4.1.x (forge, lennon, gaia, hapeville, oakmont, cedarhaven). You can get more information about them at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/m/Scott.McCrickard/agentk/ or CoCers can feel free to dive right in and use them.
Irwin monitors a number of Internet resources, including email, Usenet news, selected Web sites, and weather information. The results are summarized in a multi-level display that alerts you when changes occur and allow you to browse them using a navigation bar. Many of you have seen it before in brown bag or other talks. To get started, type ~mccricks/agentk/bin/irwin. Use c to configure, q to quit.
ScorePost keeps track of ball scores from the USA Today Web page. It fades between scores of active and completed games. To get started, type ~mccricks/agentk/bin/scorepost. Button 1 allows you to jump from game to game, button 3 lets you select games, q quits.
Stretch downloads news articles from the Yahoo news site. It alerts you when new articles arrive, and tickers article headers across the screen. It's in ~mccricks/agentk/bin/stretch -- press the big button to read the articles.
Leaderboard keeps track of current PGA events and rolls the leaders and their scores across the screen. It can be found in ~mccricks/agentk/bin/leaderboard.
Hopefully everyone will have a chance to think about some of the issues outlined above and will come to the seminar ready to share their ideas.
Last modified: Thu Oct 15 18:07:57 EDT 1998