This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. The proposed research is aimed at designing and developing a distributed intelligent information distribution and filtering system that provides personalized information services to the user while minimizing direct user involvement. The system is intended to traverse the internet to retrieve the most relevant information of interest to the user. Information filtering will be realized using a information agents, and will involve integration of advanced concepts and techniques from the domains of artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and distributed object computing. The agents will contain models of network-based dynamic information resources and will have the capability to learn changing patterns of an individual user's interest.
Four key basic research areas to be addressed are: methods for adapting various knowledge structures associated with an agent new and robust agent architectures agent collaboration protocols based on a natural or artificial economic framework agent-driven information service operations
