"Deploying Information Agents on the Web"

8/1/2003: 10:30am - 12:00pm
11th Floor Large Conference Room

Abstract: The information resources on the Web are vast, but much of the Web is based on a browsing paradigm that requires someone to actively seek information. Instead, one would like to have information agents that continuously attend to one's personal information needs. Such agents need to be able to extract the relevant information from web sources, integrate data across sites, and execute efficiently in a networked environment. In this talk I will describe the technologies we have developed to rapidly construct and deploy information agents on the web. This includes wrapper learning for turning online sources into agent-friendly resources, query planning and record linkage to integrate data across different sites, and streaming dataflow execution to efficiently execute agent plans. I will also describe how we applied this work within the Electric Elves project to deploy a set of agents for real-time monitoring of travel itineraries.

About Craig Knoblock: Craig Knoblock received his B.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. He has been at the University of Southern California (USC) since 1991 and is currently a Senior Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute and a Research Associate Professor in Computer Science. He is also the Chief Scientist for Fetch Technologies, which is a spinoff company that is commercializing some of the work developed at USC. His current research interests include information agents, information integration, automated planning, machine learning, and constraint reasoning. He leads the Information Agents Research Group, which is addressing the problems of building agents for integrating and managing web-based information sources.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006