February 10, 1997
'Independent Agents' Prove Useful as Internet Expands
By JOHN MARKOFF
nce the territory of large corporations, research laboratories and the military, advanced artificial intelligence research is now increasingly driven by the consumer electronics and entertainment industries.
More than a dozen autonomous software programs capable of operating independently -- performing tasks ranging from electronic shopping to retrieving information over the Internet -- were demonstrated at the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, which ended Saturday in Marina Del Rey, Calif. The push to commercialization of artificial intelligence is just being renewed after numerous disappointments during the 1980s. Today a growing number of researchers and entrepreneurs believes that the explosion of the Internet is paving the way for new artificial intelligence applications.
A number of executives from companies including AT&T Corp., Microsoft Corp. and IBM, were meeting in Marina Del Rey Sunday and Monday in an effort to develop industry standards for autonomous agents.
What is driving artificial intelligence now is the entertainment industry instead of the defense industry.
Danny Hillis,
Research Fellow
Walt Disney Co.
Discussions at the conference highlighted the fundamental shift that has occurred in the financing of artificial intelligence research."What is driving artificial intelligence now is the entertainment industry instead of the defense industry," said Danny Hillis, a vice president and research fellow at Walt Disney Co. Hillis, a computer scientist who founded the supercomputer-maker Thinking Machines Corp., said the shift had led to a sometimes rough cultural adjustment for computer researchers.
"The term 'agent' means something very different in Hollywood," he said.
However, the technology shift in the artificial intelligence field parallels a similar transformation in other areas of the computer industry, where increasingly powerful computing technologies are showing up first in consumer applications.
The transition has taken place in part because simplifying computing -- with voice recognition software, for instance -- often requires tremendous increases in computer power. Moreover, with the end of the cold war, the resources to make substantial investments in new computer technologies tend to be found among those companies that make products designed to go under Christmas trees.
This year's conference included multiagent programs that created synthetic characters intended to act as "greeters" on World Wide Web sites, toy robots that act like pets, software "agents"intended to simplify computer tasks and special computer gateways for voice-controlled Internet browsing or retrieval of electronic mail from cellular telephones.
Hillis said that autonomous software had already made its way into films like Walt Disney's "Hunchback of Notre Dame." In that movie, the "extras" in the crowd scenes were controlled by autonomous programs, not hand-drawn by animators. The interacting programs yielded a more realistic look than previous animated movies, he said.
Artificial intelligence technology has already begun to make its way into personal computer software. Microsoft, for example, originally used software agent technology, developed in its research laboratory, in its Office 95 application. Microsoft has extended the agent capabilities to assist computer users with basic tasks in its recently released Office 97 software.
Despite such advances, many computer researchers remain skeptical about the ability of artificial intelligence research to match human reasoning capabilities any time soon.
"It's very hard to design intelligent programs that are going to come anywhere near human intelligence," said Michael Dertouzous, director of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He said that most artificial intelligence programs fall into two broad categories: programs that follow simple if-then-else rules and other programs that try to mystify their activities, but which are also essentially trivial in their capabilities.
That fact has done little to check the enthusiasm of a new generation of entrepreneurs who are rushing to develop software agents. The newcomers play down recent disappointments like General Magic Inc., a heavily backed start-up founded by a group of former Apple Computer Inc. computer designers that promised agent-based systems.
Despite ambitious claims of a new generation of agent programs to perform electronic commerce services, General Magic failed to win consumer support and is now trying to redesign its software for the Internet.
The emergence of the World Wide Web and programming languages, like Java and Microsoft's Active-X, are viewed as creating the basis for standards that will support the development of commercial intelligent software.
"I like to think of myself as staffing cyberspace," said Barbara Hayes-Roth, chief executive of Extempo Systems Inc., a company in Santa Clara, Calif., that is developing several lines of "characters" -- interactive text or graphical programs that can interact with computer users on the Internet in ways that are more realistic and entertaining than earlier programs.
One of the earliest such programs, Eliza, was written in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Eliza was a novelty because it appeared to give conversational answers to questions. However, the program could easily be fooled into giving nonsensical answers.
Ms. Hayes-Roth, who was an artificial intelligence researcher at Stanford University before leaving to found Extempo last year, said that her company's characters functioned much like improvisational actors.
"We start by making characters that understand their situation," she said. "We want characters that are interesting and don't do the same thing over and over."
Mobile agents that move from computer to computer in the Internet to perform tasks are also being designed. The already crowded global Internet will soon be awash in a new generation of mobile programs flitting from computer to computer while automatically performing tasks as diverse as shopping and data base searching.
A group of researchers at the University of Washington computer science department described a program called Shopbot which is designed to perform price comparisons at various Internet electronic shopping malls.
Other software agent developers said that research was just beginning into the design of a network world in which programs were not cooperative and which might try to take unfair advantage of each other in commercial transactions.
"The way to think about this is to consider software agents that are capable of lying, cheating and stealing," said Tuomas Sandholm, an assistant professor in the computer science department at Washington University in Saint Louis.
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