More Than Screen Deep Toward Every-Citizen Interfaces to the Nation's Information Infrastructure (1997) / Chapter Skim
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6 Agents and Systems Intelligence
6 Agents and Systems Intelligence
Pages 180-191
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From page 180... ...
Some of these proxies will simply make the networked world more manageable by hiding technical details, much like operating systems and high-level programming languages hide details from users. An example of the kind of interaction that happens too often with current technologies appears in Box 6.1, which describes a prospective student's attempts to obtain information about scholarships.
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From page 181... ...
However, the search requires a troublesome number of difficult decisions, takes considerable time, and often results in frustration. The student must enter multiple databases that may be formatted in different ways, must interact with each on its own terms, and may have to restate his or her special interests and constraints again and again in each new environment.
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From page 182... ...
This is analogous to the task of an operating system that may receive a command to "print filer" (either typed or via a direct manipulation command) and that may issue an array of commands to machine facilities to find filer, format it for printing, allocate space for its transfer, open communication to a printer, manage a file transfer to it, receive messages back from the printer as it does its job, and so forth.
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From page 183... ...
It may be designed to handle information searches, communication jobs, educational or recreational functions, commercial buying or selling tasks, or any other function that may be available on the network. It may guide the user through complex information spaces for example, the way a travel agent guides a customer through the maze of possible itineraries or a research librarian guides a library user through the various reference search facilities.
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From page 184... ...
It must generate a proper internal message to be returned to the user and then translate it into the appropriate media modalities for presentation. Corresponding to the given input, there may be a particularly appropriate output: a menu clarification of some kind for a menu input, a spoken language output for a spoken input, and so forth.
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From page 185... ...
If the undertaking is not of the nature desired, the user must be able to modify it appropriately. Presenting the User with a Response The system response could be a list of 10,000 documents, a complex diagram with extensive annotations, an audio signal, or some other collection of complex objects.
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From page 186... ...
At any time the user may request a list of recommendations and the system will display a page containing its current recommendations, which the user can then follow or ignore. This is another example of a current technology agent in that its main mechanism depends on keyword frequency measurements to represent document content for information retrieval (Salton, 1989~.
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From page 187... ...
The apparent preferred mode for many users is the so-called direct manipulation paradigm that presents the user with a world of objects and methods to control them. Of course, there is a long tradition of automatically handling low-level details for users, as done, for example, by compilers and operating systems.
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From page 188... ...
One can set objective criteria for measuring performance and use experimental or theoretical means to guarantee that standards are met. Many of these concerns can be addressed by following the guidelines for agents presented by Pattie Maes at the 1997 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces: · Make the user model available (inspectable, modifiable)
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From page 189... ...
The multimedia/multimodal input/output methodologies described above are possible now in primitive forms (Maybury, 1993; Feiner and McKeown, 1991; Wahlster et al., 1993~. But advances are required to make progress in fundamental issues such as cross-modal integrated referring expressions, and temporal/spatial synchrony of dynamic media realization.
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From page 190... ...
Users performing standard tasks such as the scholarship search mentioned above will be helped by inferential capabilities that guide them down logically valid and wellworn paths rather than the plethora that knowledge-free search can find. Expert systems successes of the 1980s provide examples of inference systems that have found use in the real world and similar techniques can be applied immediately in ordinary-citizen applications.
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From page 191... ...
A major goal of computer science from its beginning has been to build systems that enable people to interact in languages and with paradigms that are comfortable to them and to apply the best current technologies available to deal with the array of details related to the computation. The field of agent technologies is aimed at accomplishing this for users of the NII.
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